Interoperability explains how two or more systems or components exchange and process information. The heterogeneity communication mechanisms of the components (GPRS, WIFI, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.), transmission speed, as well as the variety of the media (sound, video, text, and image) they manage have a strong influence on the interoperability. That requires the management of the adaptation to an abstract level in order to avoid ad hoc nonreusable, and/or generalizable solutions. In this paper we propose a metamodel for architectures with heterogeneous multimedia components. It enables the description of the software architectures as a collection of components manipulating various types and formats of data, and interacting between them via specific adaptation connectors.

Multimedia technology is increasingly being used to create reliable and effective communication environments. However, the design of multimedia applications is currently driven more by intuition than by empirically or theoretically derived design guidelines. In a multimedia application, the software architecture is defined as a set of components manipulating various multimedia data types with specific constraints that we must take into consideration at the architectural design. For instance, the problem of heterogeneity related to the exchanged of multimedia data flows. In the absence of prescriptive architectural design principles, MMSA (Meta-model Multimedia Software Architecture) enables the description of software architectures expressing a multimedia software system as a collection of components which handle various types and formats of multimedia data, and interacts between them via adaptation connectors. This paper proposes a modeling of architectural elements such as: multimedia, application components, communication, etc. and an UML profile for verification and validation of MMSA architectures and detection of heterogeneities between components communicating with multimedia flows.

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