The design and performance of a CORBA audio/video streaming service

Recent advances in network bandwidth and processing power of CPUs has led to the emergence of multimedia streaming frameworks, such as NetShow, Realvideo and Vxtreme. These frameworks typically rely on proprietary stream establishment and control mechanisms to access multimedia context. To facilitate the development of standards-based distributed multimedia streaming applications, the OMG has defined a CORBA-based specification that stipulates the key interfaces and semantics needed to control and manage audio/video streams. This paper makes two contributions to the study of CORBA-based distributed multimedia streaming frameworks. First, it describes the design and performance of an implementation of the OMG audio/video (A/V) streaming model based on TAO, which is a real-time CORBA ORB. Second, it describes the design mid performance of a distributed application that uses TAO´s A/V streaming framework to establish and control MPEG video streams. Our experience with TAO´s A/V streaming framework indicates that CORBA defines a flexible and efficient model for developing standards-based multimedia streaming applications.