Quality of Service in Distributed Object Systems and Distributed Multimedia Object/Component Systems

Abstract

The workshop investigated, to what extent can component technology help to enhance the quality of distributed multimedia systems. Especially, to what extent can we achieve better reuse of multimedia content, reuse of code, interoperability, portability and performance. All authors agreed upon the necessity of building distributed multimedia systems of components as opposed to monolithic systems. The granularity of the components is an open issue, it can be stated, however, that most contributors presented solutions with rather heavy-weight components. Some of the presentations required explicitly standardization of multimedia formats, both for content and meta data. Most presenters touched the topic of multimedia-aware standardized middleware. Available middleware standards still do not support to a sufficient extent techniques to provide a guaranteed quality of service, and fit thus not well to be used for distributed multimedia.

Multimedia system providers are often not interested to publish their interfaces. Thus, even if the internal design is component-oriented, the rest of the world has not much gain from this. Academic research can push openness and have a positive influence on industry.