System design for workstation-based conferencing with digital audio and video

Abstract

An investigation is conducted of the use of computer technology to support collaboration among scientists and professionals. One component of this research is the construction of a distributed, real-time, digital video conferencing system on a network of high-performance workstations. A discussion is presented of the motivation for the construction of the system, and the design of operating system and network support mechanisms for real-time communication of digital audio and video streams is outlined. The authors introduce a novel paradigm of inter-process communication called the real-time producer/consumer (RTP/C) paradigm. The RTP/C paradigm provides a framework both for expressing processor-time-dependent computations and for reasoning about the real-time behavior of programs.<>