Shuttle - A pattern for data transport and communication in distributed virtual environments

Patterns are a powerful tool to describe solutions in a particular context. Once they are identified, they can be reused many times. In this paper we preent the shuttle pattern which is the communication and data transport component in the MPSC model. The shuttle pattern is used to decouple the description of communications channels, the motive of a data transport and the inner structure of the objects which must be transported. MPSC (Modifier Presenter Sensor Controller) is a functional domain decomposition model for distributed virtual environments into four different domains, following an object-oriented approach. Each domain consissts of various nodes which are mapped to the processors in a heterogeneous computing platform. Such a platform includes workstations and also distributed memory MIMD architectures.