Engineering Commons^™

Infopipes: An Abstraction For Multimedia Streaming, Andrew P. Black, Huang Jie, Rainer Koster, Jonathan Walpole, Calton Pu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

To simplify the task of building distributed streaming applications, we propose a new abstraction for information flow – Infopipes. Infopipes make information flow primary, not an auxiliary mechanism that is hidden away. Systems are built by connecting predefined component Infopipes such as sources, sinks, buffers, filters, broadcasting pipes, and multiplexing pipes. The goal of Infopipes is not to hide communication, like an RPC system, but to reify it: to represent communication explicitly as objects that the program can interrogate and manipulate. Moreover, these objects represent communication in application-level terms, not in terms of network or process implementation.