InfoPipes are an abstraction for real-rate information flow in a distributed system. Our goal is to simplify the construction of distributed, real-rate applications. To be useful, such a pipeline must offer guarantees on the latency, rate and jitter of the flow. InfoPipes are a new system-level abstraction that can be used to build such a flow. A pipeline can be built from simple InfoPipe components such as buffers, tees, pumps, and filters.
Components push or pull information items into or from their neighbours.
An important test of the success of InfoPipes as an abstraction is whether we can encapsulate these mechanisms as reusable InfoPipe components.