On the suitability of Estelle for multimedia systems

Formal Description Techniques have been widely used for the speciication of traditional networked applications. They have not been applied to the speciication of new applications such as multimedia systems yet. In this paper, we examine the FDT Estelle with respect to its suitability for multimedia system speciication and automatic derivation of eecient implementations. We show that it is possible to specify certain aspects of multimedia systems, but that Estelle is not suucient for others. The derived implementations often perform badly. We show the reasons and propose to use a slightly modiied Estelle syntax and semantics to solve the problems. The implemented solution was tested successfully.