Multimedia Services in TINA and RM-ODP

Trends in research and commercial markets indicate a growing interest in multimedia applications that are distributed over different networks. Due to the increasing interconnectivity of these networks and the decreasing price of hardware and software, multimedia applications will reach the office and home environment soon. For these applications, audio/video exchange will be necessary between users that are geographically distributed. Moreover, as these applications will have to operate in a multi-vendor environment, they are expected to support features like interoperability and fast introduction of new or upgraded applications. Audio/video exchange between users is an important feature in the design of distributed multimedia services. Both Tina Consortium (TINA-C) and the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) need to support it. The goal of this presentation is to show how RM-ODP can be used to specify audio/video exchange between users in a distributed environment. A specification if multiparty audio/video exchange is provided that is based on the ODP notion of stream binding. The followed approach can serve as feedback to the developers of RM-ODP and to the TINA-C group that are specializing for the Telecommunication area. This presentation is organised as follows. First, the scope of the presentations is given. Section 2 presents a short overview of ODP and TINA. The relation between ODP and Multimedia is presented in section 3. Section 4 describes an example how the 5 ODP viewpoints can be applied to a multiparty audio/video service. Finally we evaluate the ODP languages from the experience obtained in applying RM-ODP to the stream binding concept.