The multimedia information link control

This paper describes the preliminary design of a multimedia information link control (MILC) that provides a framework for multimedia application development. Many of the multimedia systems, such as distributed multimedia database system and multimedia conferencing system, involve communication via the network. However, the existing transmission protocols do not preserve the characteristics of multimedia information, like real-time requirements and the preservation of temporal relation between data streams. All these features must be included in the next generation transport protocol in order to efficiently support multimedia communication. The design of MILC is not only to exploit the characteristics of multimedia information, but also to modularize information and processing rather than processing alone. The object-oriented approach has been applied to model MILC.<>