A CORBA-based platform for distributed multimedia applications

As distributed multimedia applications are starting to be offered as services in enterprise and residential cable networks, there is a growing interest in platforms that provide a standard framework for the development and deployment of these applications. Key issues in platform design are service diversity, service portability and interoperability of user terminal equipment. We propose a platform architecture for the provision of multimedia communication services which logically separates application processing from media processing. Applications are installed in application pools from where they control a set of communicating multimedia terminals. Application-specific intelligence is downloaded into the terminals in the form of Tcl/Tk or Java scripts that generate graphical user interfaces, control media processing components, and communicate with the application in the pool. The platform architecture is based on CORBA and is defined as an extensible set of IDL interfaces for control and stream interfaces for multimedia communication. The platform supports application development with high-level programming interfaces.