Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Traditional transport systems do not adequately provide the functionality or flexibility required by existing and future multimedia applications. Conventional protocol architectures based on a static configuration of relatively few protocols are incapable of providing the level of performance the channel is capable of producing while still performing the processing needed by the application. Multimedia applications require transport systems that can be configured to match the functional requirements of diverse multimedia traffic sources as well as capably of adapting to the dynamism inherent in multimedia applications and heterogeneous internetworks.

This paper describes ADAPTIVE, a transport system architecture to support multimedia applications for high-speed networks. The ADAPTIVE system applied object-oriented design and implementation techniques to build an integrated framework for protocol specification, composition, prototyping and experimentation. It utilizes a hierarchical specification technique that allows both the policies of a communication session to be specified and the actual mechanisms used to carry out these policies. Its monitoring and analysis facilities provide a rich environment for controlled experimentation through the use of rapid prototyping and integrated instrumentation.