GRAPES (Generic Resource-Aware P2P Environment for Streaming) is a library of functionalities providing some ``building blocks'' for P2P streaming applications. Each application is decomposed in a set of modules (or components), and the library contain various alternative implementations of the modules, exported through the public GRAPES API (see the list of .h files).
Ideally, a P2P streaming application can be built by linking such functionalities with a minimum amount of C code (in the best of the possible worlds, we would have some kind of GUI - like a graph editor - allowing to combine the various modules in different ways and to automatically generate the glue code for building the P2P program).
One of the design goals of the GRAPES library is not to force any particular structure in the applications using it, and it should be possible to use its APIs in either multi-threaded programs, multi-process applications, single-threaded (event based) architectures, etc... Moreover, there should not be any dependency on external libraries, and the code should be fairly portable.
The following Components/Modules can be identified:
Each module is separated into a sub-directory within the source tree, is described by a well-defined interface, and can have different implementations and/or bindings to different programming languages (for the moment, only C bindings are provided wrapper for other programming languages can be implemented based on the C library). The public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of the various modules are located in the include/ sub-directory.
Chunk Transport is a module of the GRAPES libary which is responsible for sending and receiving chunks (described by the struct chunk from chunk.h).
As for other modules, chunk transport is provided through two kinds of APIs: the high abstraction and the low abstraction API.
By design, the chunk trading API should be generic enough to support both push and pull styles of streaming.
The Signalling functionalities allow the caller to offer/request chunks, or to send buffermaps (Chunk ID Sets) between peers.
The signalling API is divided in high abstraction and low abstraction
1.6.3