“Mix and Match” Media Servers

Abstract

Network appliances are specialized computing units attached to one or more communication networks. They encompass a wide range of devices, including pagers, cellular telephones, and personal digital assistants, as well as cameras, refrigerators, and other devices with network interfaces. These appliances have limited display and control capabilities, and they exchange information using fixed transport protocols and data encodings/formats. Therefore, to be accessible from various network appliances, multimedia applications must be able to send and receive data through a variety of transport protocols and be able to handle several data encodings/formats. This paper describes an architecture that allows multimedia applications to be built from collections of media servers. It also shows how these applications can exchange data with various network appliances by “mixing and matching” appropriate media servers.