An Architecture for Streaming Control in Distributed Multimedia Systems

The development of distributed multimedia systems can benefit from the availability of a flexible infrastructure able to support the interoperation between components, and capable of dynamically adapt itself to the system configuration. CORBAcompliant distributed multimedia applications permit a high level of accessibility, decentralization and interoperability with other components. However, a large number of non-CORBA-compliant multimedia client applications are already available and commercialized. These applications have been designed according to a protocol-centric interoperation scheme. In this paper we present an innovative architecture for streaming control which allows client applications implementing the standard RTSP multimedia streaming protocol access a Multimedia Storage Server which provides a set of services through a CORBA interface. Our proposed scheme is particularly suitable in the case of proxybased scenarios, where clients do not directly interact with the storage server, but receive streams from an intermediate caching element.