An application platform for distributed multimedia computing

The emergence of multimedia has provided a great stimulus to distributed systems research with many problems introduced. For example, the guarantee of a certain end to end quality of service and the meeting of real-time constraints become much more difficult in a distributed, multimedia system. Therefore, there is a need for new techniques to aid the specification, design and construction of distributed multimedia systems. Research at Lancaster is investigating the implications of multimedia for distributed systems design. The author addresses one facet of this research, namely the experimental development of an application platform to support a range of distributed multimedia applications. An object-oriented approach is adopted for the application platform. All services offered by the platform are represented by encapsulated objects. Furthermore, this approach spans all levels of the system from basic multimedia devices such as cameras through to rich multimedia applications. This rich structuring in the application platform is illustrated in figure 1