A DISTRIBUTED OBJECT PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURE FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Although distributed object computing has developed rapidly over the p ast decade, and is now becoming commercially important, there remain k ey application areas inadequately supported by current standards and i mplementations. This paper describes research aimed at support for one of these areas: distributed soft real-time/multimedia applications. T he approach is to provide a low level platform which offers generic mi ddleware services useful for the implementation of a range of multimed ia capable distributed object systems. The design of the platform is i nfluenced on the one hand by the real-time/multimedia-oriented computa tional model of the RM-ODP and on the other hand by recent research re sults in the efficient engineering of communications systems and opera ting systems. The platform provides support for quality of service (Qo S) and application specific protocols as required by multimedia capabl e distributed object systems. A novel scheme for flexible QoS specific ation and management is described. A performance evaluation of the pla tform is given and a sample application program is presented to illust rate the platform's API. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.