Managing Real-Time Distributed Multimedia Applications

Distributed multimedia applications are characterized by timing constraints and end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements, and therefore need efficient management mechanisms to respond to transient changes in the load or the availability of the resources. This chapter presents a real-time distributed multimedia framework, based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), that provides resource management and Quality of Service for CORBA applications. The framework consists of multimedia components and resource management components. The multimedia components produce multimedia streams, and combine multimedia streams generated by individual sources into a single stream to be received by the users. The resource management components provide QoS guarantees during multimedia transmissions based on information obtained from monitoring the usage of the system’s resources.