面向流的通信.pptVIP

2.5 STREAM-ORIENTED COMMUNICATION面向流的通信 Communication as discussed so far has concentrated on exchanging more-or-less independent and complete units of information. Examples include a request invoking a procedure or method, the reply to such a request, and messages, exchanged between applications as in message-queuing systems. The characteristic feature of this type of communication is that it does not matter at what particular point in time communication takes place. Although a system may perform too slow or too fast, timing has no effect on correctness. 2.5.1 Support for Continuous Media Support for the exchange of time-dependent information is often formulated as support for continuous media. A medium refers to the means by which information is conveyed. These means include storage and transmission media, presentation media such as a monitor, and so on. An important type of medium is the way that information is represented. In other words, how is information encoded in a computer system? Different representations are used for different types of information. For example, text is generally encoded as ASCII or Unicode. Images can be represented in different formats such as GIF or JPEG. Audio streams can be encoded in a computer system by, for example, taking 16-bit samples using PCM. In continuous (representation) media, the temporal relationships between different data items are fundamental to correctly interpreting what the data actually means. We already gave an example of reproducing a sound wave by playing out an audio stream. As another example, consider motion. Motion can be represented by a series of images in which successive images must be displayed at a uniform spacing T in time, typically 30-40 msec per image. Correct reproduction requires not only showing the stills in the correct order, but also at a constant frequency of 1 /T images per second. Data Stream To capture the exchange of time-dependent information, distribu