IPC and STREAMS in Unix V.3

[Ira Brenner]

	Here is a cross-posted question regarding the use of STREAMS and
	their viability as an IPC tool. Any responses can me e-mailed back
	to me, or posted to one of the relevent groups for others as naive
	as myself on the topic.

The Problem:
	I have four main processes running simultaneously (A, B, C, D). Process
	B needs to communicate with a child (C) and another process, which may
	or may not be a child, (D). No direct communication between C and D is
	necessary. Process B also needs to communicate with process A. In 
	addition, I would like processes B, C and D to be able to send messages
	up to process A in a uni-directional manner. Furthermore, although all
	of the processes initially will be running on a single machine, it is
	possible that process A, and possibly process D, may be running on 
	different machines or  single board computers. In a semi-graphical view
	this would look something like:

	-----------------------------A
        |                            |
        |                            |
        |                            |
        |----------------------------B-------------------------
        |                                      |               |
        |                                      |               |
        |                                      |               |
        |                                      C               D
        |                                      |               | 
        |                                      |               |
        ________________________________________________________

	What I would like to do is have process B open a bi-directional stream
	between processes A-B, B-C, and B-D. Also, I need process B to open a
	universal uni-directional stream from any process up to A.

	I don't know if I can use streams in this manner of IPC. If I can, I
	could use a few pointers on how to do it. I don't think any of
	the other methods of IPC for Unix (shared memory, semephores) are
	viable in this message passing scheme. Any ideas/solutions would be
	greatly appreciated.
						Thanks in advance,
							Ira  
irab at amtfocus:UUCP
UUCP: {gatech, ihn4p, chinet, clyde}!mcdchg!amtfocus!irab