MCF (Multicast Communications Framework)

MCF Abstract

The Multicast Communication Framework (MCF) is located between applications and the operating system. MCF offers configurable protocols for data transportation and presentation of multimedia data. Real-time multimedia data is directly taken from multimedia sources such as cameras, framegrabbers, and audio devices and delivered to multimedia sinks such as framebuffers and loudspeakers. Applications never touch the real-time data, they only control the flow of the data. The time critical data handling is done inside MCF, which means that the applications do not have to cope with real-time data handling. Non real-time multimedia data are forwarded form the application to MCF, from where it is transported over the network.

MCF reserves endsystem resource in order to to guarantee the application requirements. Memory and CPU are reserved in the operating system. It is assumed that the operating system offers real-time scheduling capabilities. Each protocol runs in a separate task. For each protocol task, the scheduling priorities and memory consumption are computed from the application requirements.

MCF Publications

• Daniel Bauer, Erik Wilde, and Bernhard Plattner, "Design Considerations for a Multicast Communication Framework", Tenth Annual Workshop on Computer Communications (TCCC 95), Eastsound, Washington, September 1995.