ODP Channel: an Open Mechanism for Supporting Media Flows in Distributed Environments

Today's distributed applications need to interoperate across different administrative domains, handle multiple types of media, and execute on different computing platforms with different processing and networking capabilities. These demands pose several challenges to the application designer. Issues such as interoperability, real-time communication, security and performance must be properly addressed. This paper addresses the issue of multimedia communication across packet switching networks such as the Internet. The paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a generic communication infrastructure based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). The infrastructure's components are implemented as distributed objects. The implementation can be easily integrated into cooperative applications such as teleconference and telemedicine; serve as a basis for implementing stream interfaces as proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG); or still be a key component of a Distributed Processing Environment (DPE).