A

TERM PAPER
ON

STREAM-ORIENTED COMMUNICATIONS
Subject: Distributed System
BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY
IN
COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
SESSION: 2016-17

Submitted to:
Mr. Manvendra Singh

Submitted by:
Abhishek Agarwal
1312210003(BE13CS003)
CS-71

_______________Shri___________
____

RAMSWAROOP
MEMORIAL GROUP OF PROFESSIONAL COLLEGES
AFFILIATED TO AKTU, LUCKNOW

Table of Contents

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7

Content
Introduction
Characteristics of Stream-Oriented
Communication
Sending and Receiving
Specifying QoS
4.1 Token Bucket
Setting Up a Stream : RSVP
Stream Synchronization
6.1 Synchronization Mechanisms
References

1. Introduction

Pg. No.
1
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4-5
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7
8

Message-oriented communication implies request-response and can only be

used when communication speed does not affect correctness . But timing is
crucial in certain forms of communication.
Solution: Stream Oriented Communication
In stream-oriented communication the message content (multimedia
streams) must be delivered at a certain rate, as well as correctly
Examples: audio and video (continuous media) 30 frames/s video =>
images must be displayed in the correct order AND a frame must be
displayed every 33ms

Types of Data Streams :

Asynchronous transmission mode: the order is important, and data

is transmitted one after the other, no restriction to when data is to be
delivered

Synchronous transmission mode defines a maximum end-to-end

delay for individual data packets

Isochronous transmission mode has a maximum and minimum

end-to-end delay requirement (jitter is bounded)
Not too slow, but not too fast either

2. Characteristics of Stream-Oriented
Communication

Use data streams (supported by, e.g., Unix pipes or TCP/IP connections)
Isochronous communication
Data transfers have a maximum bound on end-to-end delay
(bounded jitter)
Push mode: no explicit requests for individual data units beyond the first
play request
Stream: a virtual connection between a source (process) and a sink (a
process or a device)
Streams can be:
Simple;
Complex (several related time dependent substreams, e.g. stereo
audio; movie image and movie sound).
Streams can have:
Single sink;
Multiple sinks (multicast streaming)

3. Sending and Receiving

4. Specifying QoS

Time-dependence and other requirements are specified as Quality of

Service requirements:
Requirements and guarantees from the underlying system (e.g.:
describe what is needed from the underlying DS and network to
ensure that the temporal relationships in a stream can be preserved)
Flow specification:

Application specifies workload and requests a certain service quality

Problem: How does the application/user knows its own
requirements ?
A contract is issued between the application and the system

4.1 Token Bucket

Token buckets are used to specify how the stream will shape its network
traffic

 Parameters (rate r, burst b, token size k )

Rate is the average rate tokens are added to bucket, burst is the
maximum number of packets that can arrive simultaneously, k is the
token size in bytes
Each time the application wants to pass a data unit of size N to the
network, it will have to remove at least N/k tokens from the bucket
Implements a relatively constant rate while allowing sporadic bursts

5. Setting Up a Stream : RSVP

(Resource Reservation Protocol)
Transport level control protocol for enabling resource reservations in
network routers
Receiver initiated QoS protocol
Receivers send reservation requests along the path to the sender
RSVP process receives and stores the specification parameters, checks if
there are available resources and checks if receiver has permission to make
the reservation

6. Stream Synchronization

Goal: maintain temporal relations between streams

Synchronization types:
Between a discrete stream and a continuous stream (e.g.: a slide
show where each slide starts playing music)
Between continuous streams (e.g.: synchronize sound and image
streams lip sync, stereo audio)
E.g. CD-quality audio stream: 16 bit samples with sampling freq =
44100Khz; synchronization between streams should take place every 23s

6.1 Synchronization
Mechanisms
Monitor programs that check streams at relevant instants and adjust rate if
necessary
Multimedia middleware systems offer a collection of interfaces to control
and synchronize streams

7. References
1. Tannenbaum, A., Steen, M., Distributed Systems: Principles and
Paradigms, Prentice-Hall International, 2002
2. Tannenbaum, A., Computer Networks, Prentice-Hall International, 3rd
ed., 1996.
3. Birrell, A. and Nelson, B., Implementing RPCs, ACM Transactions on
Computer Systems
4. Bershad, B., Anderson, T., Lazowska, E., and Levy, H., Lightweight
Remote Procedure Call, Proceedings of the 12th ACM Symposium on
Operating Systems Principles