An Architecture for Pervasive Computing

MediaBroker is a distributed framework designed to support pervasive computing applications. Specifically, the architecture consists of a transport engine and pe- ripheral clients and addresses issues in scalability, data sharing, data transformation and platform heterogene- ity. Key features of MediaBroker are a type-aware data transport that is capable of dynamically transforming data en route from source to sinks; an extensible system for describing types of streaming data; and the interac- tion between the transformation engine and the type sys- tem. Details of the MediaBroker architecture and imple- mentation are presented in this paper. Through exper- imental study, we show reasonable performance for se- lected streaming media-intensive applications. For exam- ple, relative to baseline TCP performance, MediaBroker incurs under 11% latency overhead and achieves roughly 80% of the TCP throughput when streaming items larger than 100 KB across our infrastructure.