Patent ID: 7272658

Claim:
A real-time priority-based communication system for communicating media streams made up of multiple media message sub-streams, said communication system comprising: a chunk configurator for dividing media message sub-streams into chunks; a state machine configured to utilize information regarding said media message sub-streams and said chunks and to provide state associations corresponding to said information, said state associations written into a header for each of said chunks, said state associations classifying said chunks to identify possible purposes of each chunk, wherein the possible purposes identified by said state associations consist of: a new stream chunk associated with a new media message sub-stream wherein said new stream chunk includes a plurality of new parameters in a corresponding one of said headers and uses no parameters from a previous header, a new media chunk associated with a new media message sub-stream wherein said new media chunk includes a plurality of new parameters in a corresponding one of said headers and uses at least one other parameter from a previous header, a new time chunk associated with said new media message sub-streams wherein said new time chunk includes at least one new parameter in a corresponding one of said headers and uses a plurality of other parameters from a previous header, and a continuation chunk requiring no new parameters in a corresponding one of said headers and using a plurality of parameters from a previous header; a queue for holding said chunks waiting to be transmitted; and a processor for executing a scheduling algorithm, wherein said scheduling algorithm determines one of said chunks in said queue to transmit next.