An Extension Scheme of the Berkeley Socket Interface for Multipeer Multimedia Communications

This paper proposes an extension scheme of the well-known Berkeley Socket Interface for supporting QoS-provided multipeer multimedia communications. The current BSD Socket Interface has been TCP/IP-centric historically and the protocol suite was developed for the peer-to-peer best effort data communications. In order to support multiparty multimedia applications, such key functions as group management, QoS control, and reliable multicast transport should be exploited in the current simple unicast communication architecture and the well-known interface should be extended to cover the functions. This paper proposes a few new API functions and some changes in the current APIs.