We continue to extend the set of protocols available for Horus, with a current focus on ATM signaling, low-latency wide-area ATM communication, dedicated real-time protocols, flow control, and resource reservation protocols. Work is also underway to extend general purpose operating systems to gain better control over the execution environment for more predictable behavior.
We are using the NYNET wide-area ATM testbed to experiment with the various services Horus can offer in this environment and are developing protocols for Horus that exploit the specific properties of this network. The Berkeley Video-On-Demand system, augmented with the functionality described in a previous section, is used as a test case of how to provide and control multi-media services in a wide-area high-speed network.
In conclusion, we think that Horus offers the multi-media development community a convenient architecture that allows the configuration of different collections of management and data dissemination protocols. Besides providing powerful protocols for data dissemination, Horus is a design methodology and execution model (process groups) that can be used selectively in support of the management of the distributed participants in an application.