An Open Generic Corba-Programmable Videoconferencing Platform

In this paper we address the design and implementation of a generic terminal architecture for videoconferencing based on the principle of programmable protocol stacks. In this architecture, there exist two types of software components. A first type are the multimedia engines, which are responsible for handling the multimedia stream (execution layer). Secondly, the managing components handle the multimedia engines' lifecycles and provide a set of network- and codec-independent CORBA-IDL interfaces which make building the desired protocol stack straightforward (middleware based control layer). As a result, the developed platform can be easily integrated in existing multimedia control frameworks such as the TINA architecture or the H.323 terminal framework.