Abstract:
Advances in network bandwidth and CPU processing power have enabled
the emergence of multimedia applications, such as teleconferencing or
streaming video, that exhibit significantly more diverse and stringent
quality of-service (QoS) requirements than traditional data-oriented
applications, such as file transfer or email. For instance, popular
Internet-based streaming mechanisms,allow suppliers to transmit
continuous streams of audio and video packets to consumers, employ
streaming to transfer bulk data efficiently from suppliers to
consumers.However, many distributed multimedia applications rely on
custom and/or proprietary low-level stream establishment and signaling
mechanisms to manage and control the presentation of multimedia
content. These types of applications run the risk of becoming obsolete as
new protocols and services are developed Fortunately, there is a general
trend to move from programming custom applications manually to
integrating applications using reusable components based on open
distributed object computing (DOC) middleware, such as CORBA,
DCOM, and Java RMI. Although DOC middleware is well-suited to
handle request/response interactions among client/server applications.
