Multimedia support in distributed systems

Advances in data communication and processing technologies have increasingly led to their application to novel areas. One important area is the domain of real-time distributed systems where new applications include desktop video conferencing for the support of cooperative working. These new types of applications, in addition to being distributed, also have the inherent real-time characteristics of stringent deadlines for correct operation and high bandwidth requirements. This paper investigates the issues raised by multimedia systems in the context of open distributed processing (ODP). The main issues reside in the domains of the operating system, communication system and their transport layer integration. Current operating systems are limited by their approaches to process scheduling, inter process communication (IPC) and resource allocation. Data networks are limited by the network service abstractions available and the lack of appropriate functionality for the allocation of resources, scheduling of packets and control of congestion. All of these issues are crucial to offering quality of service (QoS) guarantees on an “end to end” basis. The paper discusses these issues and proposes an architecture which would offer the QoS guarantees required by multimedia applications