Adaptive QoS aware binding of persistent multimedia objects

The heterogeneity of distributed multimedia systems in terms of hardware, operating systems, programming languages, data formats, compression formats, available resources, and QoS requirements imposes severe problems. The purpose of the middleware platform is to provide interoperability and portability of distributed system services and applications. However, today´s middleware platforms, like CORBA and TINA-DPE, do not solve all these problems. For example, automated control of interface compatibility and quality of service (QoS) support are still important research topics. This is especially true in the context of multimedia database systems (MMDBS) in distributed systems, because interface type and QoS depends on the result of queries and cannot be determined in advance. We show how the temporal object oriented data model, TOOMM, and the formal model for bindings MBS can be utilized in a heterogeneous distributed system to: (1) solve compatibility issues, (2) find agreeable levels of QoS, and (3) automatically adapt the flexible multimedia object request broker (ORB) MULTE-ORB, to application requirements and available resources