Audio Video Conferencing Using Middleware Concepts

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.