Advances in network bandwidth and CPU processing power have enabled the emergence of multimedia applications, such as teleconferencing or streaming video, that exhibit significantly more diverse and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements than traditional data-oriented applications, such as file transfer or email. For instance, popular Internet-based streaming mechanisms, such as Realvideo (RealNetworks, 1998) and Vxtreme (Vxtreme, 1998), allow suppliers to transmit continuous streams of audio and video packets to consumers. Likewise, non-continuous media applications, such as medical imaging servers (Hu et al., 1998) and network management agents (Schmidt and Suda, 1994), employ streaming to transfer bulk data efficiently from suppliers to consumers.
An extension to the CORBA Audio/Video Streaming Service: A QoS adaptive middleware
