A user-centric network communication broker for multimedia collaborative computing

The development of collaborative multimedia applications today follows a vertical development approach, which is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the pace of innovation of new generations of collaborative applications. In this paper, we propose a network communication broker (NCB) that provides a unified higher-level abstraction that encapsulates the complexity of network-level communication control and media delivery for the class of multimedia collaborative applications. NCB expedites the development of next-generation applications with diverse communication logics. Furthermore, NCB-based applications can be easily ported to new network environments. In addition, the self-managing design of NCB supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and user requirements.