Multimedia Services in Open Distributed Telecommunications Environments

In the majority of European countries a twofold change is taking place in the telecommunications marketplace. Firstly, the traditional monopolistic state owned telecommunications provider is being privatised and secondly, the market in which this newly privatised provider operates is being opened to competition from other providers (some of them newly privatised themselves). The net result of these changes is an increase in the variety of services and the reduction in the cost of traditional services (commoditisation). To compete well, these new companies have to find a competitive edge. For new services this means that they have to be of a high quality, have advanced functionality and be produced in a short time frame. For existing services, the obvious choice is to compete on cost. The prices for services provided by ex-state owned companies, however, may be regulated in order to reduce their high existing market share, in which case the focus is more on customer care and quality. In addition, the convergence of the film and television market with video games, computer and telecommunications markets makes the picture very complex

Specification of multiparty audio and video interaction based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an emerging ISO/ITU-T standard. It provides a framework of abstractions based on viewpoints, and it defines five viewpoint languages to model open distributed systems. This paper uses the viewpoint languages to specify multiparty audio/video exchange in distributed systems. To the designers of distributed systems, it shows how the concepts and rules of RM-ODP can be applied.\ud \ud The ODP ¿binding object¿ is an important concept to model continuous data flows in distributed systems. We take this concept as a basis for multiparty audio and video flow exchanges, and we provide five ODP viewpoint specifications, each emphasising a particular concern. To ensure overall correctness, special attention is paid to the mapping between the ODP viewpoint specifications

Multimedia Conferencing Services in an Open Distributed Environment

. Distributed Processing Environments (DPE) or platforms are regarded as the future telecommunication architecture [1] on which distributed applications such as Multimedia Conferencing (MMC) services will operate. Using the DPE as target telecommunication platform, an important issue for MMC designers is the specification of generic MMC interfaces. This enables MMC users to access, in a distribution transparent way, a wide range of MMC services, that conform to these interface specifications. This paper proposes a classification of MMC services by means of three generic interface templates. These interface templates describe in an implementation independent way the functionality and management related to MMC services. The paper discusses also a possible implementation of these interfaces. Techniques and concepts are used as proposed by RM-ODP [2] and TINA-C [1]. Keywords. Multimedia Conferencing Services, RM-ODP, TINA-C, Distributed Processing Environment (DPE) 1 Introduction Distrib..

A Computational and Engineering View on Open Distributed Real-Time Multimedia Exchange

. An important requirement for distributed multimedia applications is the support of real-time communication and the means to specify real-time aspects. The aim of this paper is to extend RM-ODP and TINA-C computational and engineering views on distributed systems for the specification and support of real-time communication. It is expected that these bodies have a major impact in the area of distributed processing. However, concepts and mechanisms to support real-time communication are not yet fully included or detailed in these standards. In particular this paper addresses Quality of Service (QoS) specifications for continuous dataflows. These QoS specifications are described from the ODP computational and engineering viewpoint and the repercussions of these QoS specifications for functions located in both the computing and telecommunications environment are discussed. Keywords. Distributed Multimedia Architectures, QoS, ODP, TINA-DPE 1. Introduction In the near future, distributed..