Partial order transport service for multimedia applications: reliable service

This paper introduces a partial order connection (POC) protocol. Motivated in particular by multimedia applications, POC is an end-to-end connection that provides a partial order service, that is, a service that requires some, but not all objects to be received in the order transmitted. This paper discusses R-PO, a reliable version of POC which requires that all transmitted objects are eventually delivered. A metric based on the number of linear extensions of a partial order in the presence of no lost objects is proposed to quantify different partial orders. Means for its calculation is presented when P can be modeled as a combination of sequential and/or parallel compositions of Petri-nets. This metric allows one to compare and evaluate the complexity of different partial order services.<>