User-Centric Communication Middleware Technical Report FIU-SCIS-2005-1101 November 2005

The development of communication applications today follows a vertical development approach where each application is built on top of low-level network abstractions such as the socket interface. This stovepipe development process is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the pace of innovation of new generation of communication applications. In this paper, we propose a user-centric communication middleware (UCM) that provides a unified higher-level abstraction for the class of multimedia communication applications. We investigate the minimum set of necessary requirements for this abstraction from the perspective of next-generation communication applications, and provide an API that exemplifies this abstraction. We demonstrate how UCM encapsulates the complexity of network-level communication control and media delivery. Further, we show how its extensible and self-managing design supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and application requirements with negligible overhead. Finally, we argue that UCM enables rapid development of portable communication applications, which can be easily deployed on IP-based networking infrastructure.

[1]  Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.  The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment An Object-Oriented Network Programming Toolkit for Developing Communication Software , 1993 .

[2]  Ralph Johnson,et al.  design patterns elements of reusable object oriented software , 2019 .

[3]  Seyed Masoud Sadjadi,et al.  Composable Proxy Services to Support Collaboration on the Mobile Internet , 2003, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[4]  Robbert van Renesse,et al.  Building adaptive systems using ensemble , 1998 .

[5]  Matti A. Hiltunen,et al.  Adaptive Distributed and Fault-Tolerant Systems , 2007 .

[6]  Jeffrey O. Kephart,et al.  The Vision of Autonomic Computing , 2003, Computer.

[7]  David Garlan,et al.  Aura: an Architectural Framework for User Mobility in Ubiquitous Computing Environments , 2002, WICSA.

[8]  Christian Huitema,et al.  STUN - Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs) , 2003, RFC.

[9]  Michael A. Ramalho,et al.  Media Gateway Control Protocol Architecture and Requirements , 2000, RFC.

[10]  Seyed Masoud Sadjadi,et al.  Composing adaptive software , 2004, Computer.

[11]  Jonathan D. Rosenberg,et al.  Network Working Group a Framework for Conferencing with the Session Initiation Protocol (sip) , 2022 .

[12]  Michael Jackson,et al.  Distributed Feature Composition: A Virtual Architecture for Telecommunications Services , 1998, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[13]  Klara Nahrstedt,et al.  An overlay based QoS-aware voice-over-IP conferencing system , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8763).

[14]  D. Salber,et al.  The Context Toolkit : Aiding the Development of Context-Aware Applications , 2000 .

[15]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  A protocol for reliable decentralized conferencing , 2003, NOSSDAV '03.

[16]  Mary Shaw,et al.  Dynamic configuration of resource-aware services , 2004, Proceedings. 26th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[17]  Nalini Venkatasubramanian.  Safe 'composability' of middleware services , 2002, CACM.

[18]  Gordon S. Blair,et al.  Adaptive middleware for mobile multimedia applications , 1997, Proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV '97).

[19]  Klara Nahrstedt,et al.  Adaptive middleware architecture for a distributed omnidirectional visual tracking system , 1999, Electronic Imaging.

[20]  Matti A. Hiltunen,et al.  Constructing adaptive software in distributed systems , 2001, Proceedings 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[21]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications , 1996, RFC.

[22]  Pamela Zave,et al.  Component coordination: a telecommunication case study , 2004, Comput. Networks.

[23]  Eric Cheung,et al.  An open architecture for next-generation telecommunication services , 2004, TOIT.

[24]  Zièd Choukair,et al.  Dynamic, adaptive and reconfigurable systems overview and prospective vision , 2003, 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, 2003. Proceedings..

[25]  Gerd Kortuem,et al.  When peer-to-peer comes face-to-face: collaborative peer-to-peer computing in mobile ad-hoc networks , 2001, Proceedings First International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing.

[26]  Richard D. Schlichting,et al.  The Cactus Approach to Building Configurable Middleware Services , 2000 .

[27]  M. Wang.  The Bio-Networking Architecture : A Biologically Inspired Approach to the Design of Adaptive Network Applications , 2001 .

[28]  Keith W. Ross,et al.  Computer networking - a top-down approach featuring the internet , 2000 .