Intelligent Devices as Symmetric Partners for End--to--end Data Flows
Report ID: TR-642-02Author: Peterson, Larry / Wawrzoniak, Mike / Shalaby, Nadia
Date: 2002-07-00
Pages: 28
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Abstract:
The recent emergence of end-to-end services and multimedia networking applications has led to the desire to support data flows between arbitrary devices. Connecting heterogeneous devices presents an $N\times{}N$ programming problem since each device must be able to interface with each other device, as well as with code modules that transform the data stream. This paper defines a partner architecture that allows the application builder to connect devices to each other---as well as to code modules that transform the data---by wrapping both modules and device drivers in a common interface. Moreover, this interface is symmetric in the sense that the device on either side may be either the master or the slave. The paper demonstrates the generality of the partner architecture by giving examples of how video, audio, filesystem, network, and sockets ``devices'' use the interface. It also presents performance numbers that show that the overhead imposed by the architecture is very small.