A CORBA Based QOS Support for Distributed Multimedia Applications

Advance object oriented computing platform such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) provides a conducive and standardized framework for the development of distributed applications. Most of the off-the-shelf CORBA are implemented over legacy network transports and distributed processing platforms such as TCP/IP and RPC. They are not suitable for real-time applications due to their high processing overheads, and lack of features and mechanisms in supporting quality of service both at the network level and at the end-host level. To overcome this limitation we have designed and implemented a CORBA-based Real Time Stream Service (RTSS) that allows real-time streams to be managed through the ‘CORBA channel’ but by-passing the heavy CORBA protocol stacks. RTSS aims to achieve an integrated QOS framework that incorporates both host scheduling and end-to-end network-level QOS to better support the processing of distributed multimedia applications over ATM networks. For host scheduling, a novel scheme of frequency-based scheduling mechanism has been proposed to cope with dynamic CPU load condition. The scheme has been implemented for a stand-alone host and will be extended to the networked environment. At the network-level QOS, RTSS provides object-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs) which guarantee end-to-end QOS when operating directly over ATM adaptation layers. The benefits of RTSS for the development of real-time multimedia distributed applications are demonstrated through a number of experiments.