Communication support for distributed multimedia components

The development of distributed multimedia applications has always been a challenge for both expert and nonexpert developers. Middleware and supporting frameworks have emerged to simplify this process by providing reusable components that can be plugged together in many configurations to help application developers building up their applications. In distributed multimedia, the adoption of such frameworks allows the exchange of media (i.e. audio, video, etc.) and configuration data (i.e. where, how, etc.) transparently through the network. Application developers do not have to deal with details related to the location of data sources and destinations, network protocols used, or even the quality of service (QoS) requirements at the network level. Most framework designers tend to concentrate on the aspect of generalising and enhancing the functionality of the framework components and leave the communication between these components to be managed by one of the standard distributed object platforms such as CORBA, DCOM or JavaRMI. This paper describes research undertaken to tackle the problems of designing and managing communication between distributed multimedia components. The design of a supporting framework is explained with emphasis on the communicational aspect of its components. The paper also includes a case study which illustrate the use of the framework.