The NDFS-II has been developed to be a data transport medium that operates within a local area network only. It takes advantage of the gigabyte networks. Performance has always been a top-priority during the design and development of the system. Gathering data from sensors spread geographically was never a requirement. Therefore, the system does not work for applications having parts running on different networks such as the Internet. A data flow server must be on the same subnet to join an application domain because servers use a multicast request to discover each other. This request cannot go through routers, so the NDFS-II is limited to LAN networks.

Operating systems offers different capabilities. When choosing which one to use, several parameters must be weighed, including but not limited to:

Users can have constraints, which limit them to a particular operating system. We believe it is our role to adapt to them by providing a cross-platform middleware.

We noticed some limitations while developing multimodal application using the NDFS-II. For example, Linux appears to be the operating system having the best network throughput. We also learned that Windows XP can only handle up to 128 network connections.