Mix and Match Media Servers

This paper introduces the underlying hypothesis of our current research-the growing popularity and diversity of network appliances will engender an industry based upon "modular" media servers. Network appliances are specialized computing units attached to one or more communication networks. They encompass a wide range of devices, including cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and refrigerators with network interfaces. Because they are designed for specialized functions, these appliances often have limited display and control capabilities. In addition, these devices must often send and receive data to and from their network connections using fixed transport protocols cna data encodings. Hence, multimedia applications that are accessible from various network appliances must be able to send and receive data through a variety of transport protocols and data encodings. For example, a message application might send/receive text to/from a refrigerator via FTP, send/receive MIME messages to/from a PDA via TCP, and send/receive speech messages to/from a telephone via the public switched telephone network. In this paper, we describe how multimedia applications can be built from collections of media servers, which can be behave as independent, modular processes or devices. We show how developers can then create applications by "mixing and matching" appropriate media servers.