A CORBA Bidirectional-Event Service for Video and Multimedia Applications

The development of multimedia applications using the CORBA A/V Streaming architecture, suffers from a complex software design. This is not a minor drawback in a middleware architecture, intended to simplify the software development process. One source of complexity is the absence of a flexible signaling mechanism to communicate application-dependent control information. As a consequence, developed applications must design parallel communication processes between end points, which obscures the design. Another shortcoming identified, is the rigid flow establishment process, which does not allow the selection of an asynchronous connection setup. In this paper we present an extension of the A/V Streaming service, which addresses these issues. The service proposed provides access to the applications through an integrated bidirectional event-based signaling mechanism. The A/V Streaming extension offers this functionality by means of a CORBA Bidirectional Event Service, also presented in this paper. The A/V Streaming extension under consideration is implemented and comparatively evaluated with the original service, in the CORBA ACE/TAO distribution. Benchmark results validate our proposal, and encourage its practical utilization.