A Hybrid Approach to Real-time Synchronisation in Distributed Multimedia Systems

One of the major requirements of distributed multimedia applications is the need to maintain, often complex, real-time synchronisation constraints. More specifically, it is necessary to be able to manage arbitrary intraand intermedia synchronisation across activities in the distributed environment. Furthermore, it is important that such developments are integrated into emerging object-oriented standards for distributed computing. This paper presents an object-oriented programming model and associated implementation to meet these requirements. The main concepts behind the proposed approach are, firstly, the use of reactive objects for real-time control and synchronisation and, secondly, quality of service controlled bindings for predictable communication between objects. The flexibility of the approach is demonstrated by three contrasting examples of real-time synchronisation. In addition, the relationship of the proposals to hypermedia is examined.