Experiences in implementing a distributed object platform for multimedia applications

Two current trends in distributed computing are the emergence of standardized distributed object platforms such as CORBA, and the increasing use of continuous media data types. This paper describes and evaluates a platform which supports both standard CORBA interactions and continuous media interactions in a fully integrated environment, The platform is implemented as a self-contained support infrastructure (GOPI core) and a separate 'personality' that sits on top of the infrastructure and provides a CORBA API. The platform user can create both request/reply oriented and stream oriented bindings with quality of service specifications that are honoured (as far as possible) by the infrastructure. A framework for quality of service management which involves the monitoring and adaptation of quality levels is also supported. The level of performance attained by the platform provides evidence of the feasibility of natively supporting continuous media in a distributed object platform environment. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd