Controlling and managing distributed multimedia applications

This paper describes a service by which users will be able to select, configure and activate multimedia services in a multivendor broadband environment. The service interface hides the difficulties and details of handling these complex services from the application. An abstract model is defined that accommodates an extensive set of services involving communication and end-systems. The paper defines several abstractions, describes these abstractions by an object-oriented approach and defines a set of primitives for the manipulation of these objects. To show the applicability of our service, a video-on-demand distribution scenario is used.