Coordinating Components In The Multimedia System Services Architecture

The purpose of this work is to examine and exploit the potential of the coordination paradigm to act as the main communication and synchronization mechanism between components forming a distributed multimedia environment and exhibiting real-time properties. Towards this purpose, we have developed a mechanism for coordinating the distributed execution of components, as these are defined by the Multimedia System Services Architecture (MSSA). Our coordination environment uses the control-driven approach to coordination, namely the model IWIM and the associated language Manifold. In the process we show how Manifold can be used to realize object communication and synchronization of MSSA components and we present a methodology of combining a software architecture such as MSSA with a coordination language such as Manifold. We illustrate our approach by means of a suitable example.