Design and performance of a media gateway trader

Abstract

Multimedia applications of tomorrow face new challenges. As we move towards ubiquitous computing systems, users will require that the multimedia applications adopt to behave well in this new setting. This will require that application developers are equipped with new development tools and abstractions to help construct these new applications. A binding framework which supports heterogeneous participants in multimedia bindings is presented. This framework allows for run-time checking of whether binding participants can meaningfully bind to each other. It also supports media gateways. These are services which can be used to automatically resolve incompatibilities between heterogeneous participants in multimedia bindings. Properties of gateways can be described trough a proposed gateway description language (GDL), and it is shown how gateways can be automatically selected at run-time. The design, implementation and a performance evaluation of a media gateway trader prototype is given. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.