MODEL FOR FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATION OF APPLICATION-ORIENTED COMMUNICATION SERVICES

Innovation in the area of communications technology and the promise of future networks open fascinating fields for distributed applications in various areas. However, distributed applications differ in their requirements for an underlying communication system. The goal of our approach is to provide flexible and efficient communication services tailored to the individual needs of distributed applications. This is achieved by a set of well-defined communication building blocks, out of which a broad spectrum of communication services can be configured. The configuration is driven by a communication context describing the communication requirements of a distribution application. Moreover, the configuration activity has to take into account dependencies between the communication building blocks which are expressed by global sequencing rules. To support configurability and flexibility in the realization we use an object-oriented implementation technique which provides a natural mapping of specification concepts onto implementation features.