A distributed object platform infrastructure for multimedia applications

Although distributed object computing has developed rapidly over the past decade, and is now becoming commercially important, there remain key application areas inadequately supported by current standards and implementations. This paper describes research aimed at support for one of these areas: distributed soft real-time/multimedia applications. The approach is to provide a low level platform which offers generic middleware services useful for the implementation of a range of multimedia capable distributed object systems. The design of the platform is influenced on the one hand by the real-time/multimedia-oriented computational model of the RM-ODP and on the other hand by recent research results in the efficient engineering of communications systems and operating systems. The platform provides support for quality of service (QoS) and application specific protocols as required by multimedia capable distributed object systems. A novel scheme for flexible QoS specification and management is described. A performance evaluation of the platform is given and a sample application program is presented to illustrate the platform's API. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.