MMSA: Metamodel Multimedia Software Architecture

Abstract

Interoperability explains how two or more systems or components exchange and process information. The heterogeneity communication mechanisms of the components (GPRS, WIFI, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.), transmission speed, as well as the variety of the media (sound, video, text, and image) they manage have a strong influence on the interoperability. That requires the management of the adaptation to an abstract level in order to avoid ad hoc nonreusable, and/or generalizable solutions. In this paper we propose a metamodel for architectures with heterogeneous multimedia components. It enables the description of the software architectures as a collection of components manipulating various types and formats of data, and interacting between them via specific adaptation connectors.

An adaptation platform for multimedia applications CSC (component, service, connector)

“…Our main motivation is to provide a platform to maintain the consistency of configurations implemented by assembling heterogeneous components using meta‐model for multimedia software architecture (MMSA) (Derdour et al , 2010) which provides for new types of graphical interfaces and connectors with a richer semantics. The use of these interfaces allows the automatic detection of heterogeneity points between components, while the use of adaptation connectors allows resolving these heterogeneities.…”

“…Indeed, software architectures validate the functional aspects, which is not enough to ensure a realistic assembly and addressing the problems of heterogeneity of data flow exchanged. To detect these incompatibilities and to make possible a solution, a model‐based approach called MMSA was proposed in Derdour et al (2010). It allows the description of software architectures using an UML‐profile dedicated to express a software system as a collection of components which handle various types and formats of data and which interacts between them via connectors including adaptation connectors.…”

“…In MMSA (Derdour et al , 2010) we presented the architectural aspect of multimedia applications and the mechanisms to verify the configurations of these applications. The CSC platform focuses on the behavioral and dynamics aspects of adaptation mechanisms.…”

“…It cooperates with QoS manager at each level of connector adaptation.The assembly manager ensures the assembly/reassembly of components and connectors.After detecting a context changes, the platform begins by a replacement of adaptation services to respond to this change, if the replacement of adaptation services is not sufficient and does not meet the new context, the platform precedes the replacement of some components followed by reassembling or reconfiguring of application if necessary. In the case of reconfiguration, we must select carefully new components of the new configuration and then checking the consistency of the configuration using the MMSA approach (Derdour et al , 2010). Then, the adaptation layer provides the necessary services and integrates them into the connectors (Figure 8).…”