An object-oriented interface for a distributed connection manager

Connection management (CM) is the part of the network software architecture for broadband networks that allows for the abstraction and control of multimedia, multiparty connections over heterogeneous communication networks. Network control is accomplished by controlling the switching facilities and allocating transmission and special resources (e.g. multicasters, signal converters and signal combiners). This paper proposes an interface to CM that assumes that both CM and CM clients may be distributed. The CM interface is based on several requirements which call for a simple, flexible, extensible transaction-based interface. The proposed solution uses an object-oriented approach to model a directed graph. The CM interface transport model contains object classes that model the components of a directed graph and are used to represent the network resources and the connectivity among them. An additional object class satisfies the transaction requirements of the interface.<<ETX>>