QRTP: A Middleware for Broadband Networks

Abstract

Broadband networks, such as those based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), provide large bandwidth and multiple services. An essential application area for broadband networks is multimedia systems. The development of multimedia applications, however, is currently lagging behind the advances in the network technology. Our approach to the problem of more effectively developing multimedia applications is to provide developers with a middleware that encompasses a set of broadband-specific services needed by multimedia applications, for instance virtual connection setup, bandwidth reservation and session synchronization. Our middleware, called the Queen's Real-time Transport Protocol (QRTP), is based on the Real-time Transport Protocol standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force. The paper discuses the design, implementation and evaluation of the QRTP middleware.