The Convergence Project

Demo&Downloads

The CONVERGENCE project is developing a reference implementation of the CONVERGENCE middleware and of a selected set of Applications.

The CONVERGENCE PEER KIT is a downloadable bundle which is offered for evaluation. It comprises a sample Application, built on top of the CONVERGENCE middleware, and a release of the current status of the CONVERGENCE middleware itself.

The CONVERGENCE middleware is an extension of the new standard coming from MPEG, the MPEG-M specification, for an ecosystem of interconnected services supporting distributed applications that create, trade and consume digital objects in so called “media value chains”.

The CONVERGENCE project is extending this specification in order to support the publish/subscribe paradigm of producing and searching for content (decoupling in time and space of information producers and consumers), semantic tagging and an underlying Content Centric Network layer.

The CONVERGENCE PEER KIT includes MPEG-M middleware engines that support:

• Creation of standard MPEG-21 Digital Items
• Identification protocols to assign unique identifiers to Digital Items
• Packaging of Digital Items in a standard MPEG File Format
• Support for publish and subscribe operations to content’s metadata (limited to keyword tags for now)
• Event Reporting about interesting content being found
• Storage and retrieval of Digital Items in a globally accessible Content Centric Network, by means of their identifiers instead of location (hostname)

The CONVERGENCE PEER KIT includes a simple sample application built on top of the existing engines, that allows for a simple photo/document sharing and retrieval of documents by using keyword tags to publish them and subscribe to them.

Users subscribe to desired descriptor tags, and as soon as matching content becomes available in the network (somebody else has published similar content), such content is delivered to subscriber’s peers.

Download the Convergence Peer Kit

Download Installation Manual

The following two links provide access to the full and latest implementation of both the middleware and the network layers of CONVERGENCE.

The CONVERGENCE middleware, namely COMID, is composed by the default core set of MPEG-M Engines (which could also be fetched from the official SVN repository of the MXM MPEG-M project) plus a set of project-specific Engines based on the MPEG-M APIs and architecture. The following ComidToolKit download is the all-inclusive version of COMID, with build instructions.

Download the CONVERGENCE ComidToolKit

COMID may run on top of the CONVERGENCE ICN, namely CONET. The ConetToolKit includes all CONET functionalities (e.g. CCNx modified version, Lookup and Cache server, Name Routing System, etc.) and the script used to test CONET over PlanetLab, described in [1].

Download the CONVERGENCE ConetToolKit

Middleware components are released under BSD license. Network components are released under mixed LGPL/GPL license.

Don’t forget to check documentation included in project’s deliverables (follow links in the website) and feel free to contact project’s tech support Andrea Detti and Giuseppe Tropea at the following email addresses for any question regarding installation and testing.

andrea.detti at uniroma2.it
giuseppe.tropea at cnit.it

[1] N. Blefari Melazzi, A. Detti, M. Pomposini,”Scalability Measurements in an Information-Centric Network”, to appear in  “Measurement-based experimental research: methodology, experiments and tools”, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 7586, 2012, Editors: Lluís Fàbrega, Pere Vilà, Davide Careglio, Dimitri Papadimitriou (pdf)