Extending OMG event service for integrating distributed multimedia components

Developing multimedia applications, such as video and audio applications, is a difficult task because of the stringent requirement on system resources and the great diversity of multimedia standards and devices. Many existing multimedia systems are monolithic and extremely complex. It is hard to extend and reconfigure those systems. Easy extensibility and reconfigurability is desirable since multimedia research and development is one of the fastest changing fields in computer science. On the other hand, event-based systems seem to be the right solution to these software engineering problems by allowing software integration in a loose and flexible way. Several emerging standards for distributed integrative environments, like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture(CORBA) from the Object Management Group (OMG), have defined standard event service interfaces. However, most existing event services in those systems cannot provide the Quality of Service (QoS) that multimedia applications need. In this paper we address this problem by extending standard OMG event service with temporal factors so that the system can deliver large volume events, like video frames, in real time. A new type of event service called timed event service is proposed and deployed in constructing the high-performance event services. To demonstrate the feasibility of our design, we have prototyped this fast CORBA-compliant event service in the Distributed System Object Model (DSOM).