The design of an application programming interface for QoS-based multimedia middleware

With the advent of networked and distributed multimedia applications, requirements of middleware for providing advanced communication services changed. The needs in well suited architectures for delivering unchanged high network performance to multimedia applications and flexible communication services increased. In any case, applications have to access services of multimedia middleware and they are required to be programmed on top of these systems. Therefore, the developed application programming interface takes into account service specifications in terms of quality of service and an easy to use and intuitively programmable communication service for multimedia applications. This interface for advanced multimedia middleware hides away communication relevant information from applications and provides a minimal set of interface functions and operations