Building Internet Multimedia Applications: The Integrated Service Architecture and Media Frameworks

Abstract

The Internet has become a ubiquitous service environment. This development provides tremendous opportunities for building real-time multimedia applications over the Internet. In this chapter, we present a state-of-the art coverage of the Internet integrated service architecture and two multimedia frameworks that support the development of real-time multimedia applications. The Internet integrated service architecture supports a variety of service models beyond the current best-effort model. A set of new real-time protocols that constitute the integrated service architecture are described in some detail. The new protocols covered are those for real-time media transport, media session setup and control, and those for resource reservation in order to offer the guaranteed service. We then describe two emerging media frameworks that provide a high-level abstraction for developing real-time media applications over Internet: CORBA Media Streaming Framework (MSF) and Java Media Framework (JMF), both of which provide an object-oriented multimedia middleware. The future trends are also discussed.