Developing Multimedia Applications with the OMG Streaming Framework

This paper presents an implementation of the OMG (Object Management Group) media streaming framework and discusses how this speciication addresses some key issues related to multimedia communication, such as quality of service, support to multi-party streams, and ability to interwork with other multimedia infrastructures such as the World Wide Web. The OMG standard \Control and Management of Audio/Video Streams" (A/V Streams) is a CORBA-based (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) infrastructure composed of a set of distributed objects with standardized operations that implement an open media streaming framework. In order to evaluate the OMG A/V Streams service, two distributed applications were designed and implemented. The rst one is a simple application demanding point-to-point multimedia communication, being the second application a more complex one demanding multipoint-to-multipoint communication. The work reported in this paper also shows that the OMG A/V Streams service is a powerful framework for developing distributed multimedia applications. Being CORBA-based, the service ooers interoperability with any software component able to access an Object Requester Broker.