Interactive Multimedia Streams in Distributed Applications

Distributed multimedia applications typically handle two different types of communication: request/reply interaction for control information as well as real-time streaming data. The CORBA Audio/Video Streaming Service provides a promising framework for the efficient development of such applications. In this paper, we discuss the CORBA-based design and implementation of Campus TV, a distributed television studio architecture. We analyze the performance of our test application with respect to different configurations. We especially investigate interaction delays, i.e., the latencies that occur between issuing a CORBA request and receiving the first video frame corresponding to the new mode. Our analysis confirms that the interaction delay can be reasonably bounded for UDP and RTP. In order to provide results which are independent from coding schemes, we do not take into account any media specific compression issues. Hence, our results help to make essential design decisions while developing interactive multimedia applications in general, involving e.g., distributed synthetic image data, or augmented and virtual reality.