OCTOPUS: an adaptive group communication environment for multimedia application

OCTOPUS is designed to provide a middleware level support for audio and video services in the Internet. To provide an adaptive group communication framework, the OCTOPUS architecture is designed to segregate the control and management of connection, membership, quality of service and streams. Existing middleware designed for multimedia communication lacks support for dynamic swapping of protocol stacks and QoS support. We describe the OCTOPUS architecture and the design and development of key components. These key components ease the development effort of multimedia streaming applications for group communication and provide adaptive communication through the provision of dynamic protocol swapping and QoS support in these applications.