In Chapters 
and , I introduced multimedia data streams and
examined their characteristics. In particular, I showed in Section
that, due to the inherent real-time requirements of
multimedia data, QoS control mechanisms, specialised multimedia
transmission protocols, and multi-point communication structures
are essential for the transmission of multimedia data streams.
Next, I reviewed techniques that have been developed for the transmission of
time-dependent data in Chapter . I deliberately
concentrated on solutions provided by the Internet Engineering Task
Force. Particularly, I presented the Internet Integrated Services
Architecture, the Resource ReSerVation Protocol, Internet multicasting
protocols, the Real-Time Transport Protocol, and the
meta-conference--management protocols developed by the Multiparty
Multimedia Session Control (MMUSIC) working group of the IETF.
Chapter linked the transmission of multimedia data streams with
the object-oriented design of multimedia applications.
I focused on design approaches based on the data-stream and
object-stream models, because they are especially suitable for the
integration of network communication.
The second part of this thesis, consisting of Chapters and
, saw the presentation of the design and implementation of an
object-oriented architecture for the transmission of multimedia data
streams that I developed based on the basis of the ideas of the preceding
chapters. The architecture provides a communication
framework for distributed, interactive multimedia applications.
The mmstream prototype implementation, programmed using
Sun's Java Development Kit, serves as a proof of concept for
the architectural design.
The implementation currently
incorporates the Real-Time Transport Protocol, a self-defined session
description protocol, a sample graphical user interface, and data-producing and
data-consuming elements emulating real multimedia-data-stream sources and
sinks for testing the transmission components. If the necessity should
arise, the implementation can be easily adapted to accommodate other
protocols.