Extensions to ANSA for Multimedia Computing

Distributed systems has been an area of intense activity over the past ten years. The subject is entering a stage of maturity with work now focussing on standards for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). However, it is important that standardisation is responsive to new demands on the technology. This is especially true with the emergence of high speed networks in general and multimedia computing in particular. This paper describes research into handling multimedia in the Advanced Networked Systems Architecture (ANSA), a state of the art distributed platform. It is shown that ANSA, although comprehensive in scope, fails to explicitly address multimedia requirements. A number of specific extensions are proposed to remedy these omissions. These include streams, as an abstraction over multimedia protocols, and chains, as a generic control interface to multimedia devices (including storage servers). Importantly, the proposed extensions do not affect the core ANSA architecture, but instead add the necessary functionality in terms of additional services.