A CORBA Compliant Real-Time Multimedia Platform for Broadband Networks

We describe the architecture of a CORBA-based platform offering end-to-end multimedia communications and processing support in a broadband network environment. The design gives application programmers an extended CORBA computational model incorporating explicit support for continuous media including quality of service abstractions. The proposed architecture goes beyond existing multimedia-in-CORBA platforms by integrating continuous media data types as first class types in the application programmer’s computational model. This is in contrast to currently proposed platforms which typically adopt an ‘off line plumbing’ approach where application programmers connect together ‘standard’ multimedia objects and then monitor and control the flow of media inside these objects. We present our extensions in detail using code examples based on Iona’s Orbix CORBA 2.0 compliant platform. We also offer a scenario illustrating the use of our extensions and the implementation of a simple binding object.