MACSE: A generic connection establishment protocol for multimedia communication residing at the OSI application layer

Abstract The multiple association control service element (MACSE) described in this work is a new connection establishment protocol for the application layer of the OSI reference model (OSIRM). The objective of the protocol is efficient establishment and control of multimedia associations among multiple spatially dispersed users. MACSE defines a new OSI service to support the communication requirements of multimedia applications so as to shift the burden of setting‐up a complex call to a protocol entity, instead of the application developer. The MACSE protocol enhances the OSIRM by introducing careful service definition, service primitives and relevant parameters, as well as a non‐monolithic protocol specification. The protocol defines procedures for the negotiation and confirmation of quality of service (QoS) per association while it forms the core of a proposed architectural model which provides a coherent treatment of QoS across all layers of the OSIRM and reduces the complexity of it. Out‐of‐band, rather than in‐band, signalling at the application layer and multi‐target associations are introduced and analysed, in contrast to the structure of the well‐known OSI association control service element (ACSE) protocol. Moreover, ACSE can be considered a particular case of MACSE.