IMOS, also known as IP multimedia operating system, aims to create a multimedia development platform in the IP field. On the one hand, it supports monitoring, video, media publishing, VOD, and voice services, improving development efficiency and reducing maintenance costs. On the other hand, it also has a more long-term significance, laying the foundation for the continuous enrichment and improvement of H3C multimedia products, and providing flexible space for customers, partners, and industry friends to develop value-added services, technical cooperation, and technological innovation.

Video conferencing, video surveillance, video publishing, remote presentation… Multimedia has become the fastest growing and most dynamic field in the IP field, attracting a large number of manufacturers to enter this field, and new products and businesses emerge one after another. However, temptation comes with impatience. Currently, in many multimedia related industries, many core processing parts of video and audio are completed by chips or hardware, and software is more about controlling, managing, and presenting business. In addition, due to fierce market competition and limited product lifecycle, there are too many people pursuing “short, flat, and fast” product development, pursuing short-term speed while neglecting long-term accumulation, emphasizing interface presentation and infrastructure, and looking at individual products and projects, as well as product launch speed. But looking at it for a longer period of time, it is always constantly low-level repetitive development, making it difficult to continuously meet customer needs. Especially when the current multimedia business is still in the process of continuous integration and evolution, how to meet the needs of multimedia business integration is a challenge faced by all multimedia product and solution providers.

Multimedia services have become the most dynamic and promising applications on IP networks, such as IPTV, IP monitoring, IP telephony, video conferencing, media teaching, and so on. In the development of various multimedia applications, we are thinking about a question: where are the commonalities of multimedia? What are the differences? Why is it not easy to achieve unified communication and unified video?

Firstly, analyze the commonalities of multimedia applications:

Common media streaming: H.264;

Common call control signaling: SIP;

Common device management method: SNMP;

Common business interface methods and similar calling actions: XML, media calling, retrieval, on-demand; Camera control;

Common basic support: operating system adaptation, configuration management, alarm management, and user management.

These commonalities can be summarized as the five character decision: “see, control, store, manage, and use.”.

And many differences make media applications ever-changing:

Different media application methods: one-way/two-way, real-time/non real-time, peer-to-peer/peer-to-peer;

Different business presentation interfaces: B/S, C/S;

Different customer market positioning: operator, industry, business;

Different industry customer requirements: finance, electricity, Ping An engineering

How to “seek common ground while reserving differences”? An infrastructure platform is crucial. As we all know, with the widespread application of Windows, various businesses based on Windows can be easily carried out. Similarly, with the IMOS platform, it is possible to achieve common services for viewing, controlling, storing, managing, and using multimedia services, present diverse media application methods, display rich business presentation interfaces, and meet differentiated industry customer requirements.

The design concept of “seeking common ground while reserving differences”

“Seeking common ground while reserving differences” is the fundamental concept and design starting point of IMOS. There are many rich multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, video surveillance, IPTV, video publishing, video calling

At first glance, the direct difference between these multimedia applications is so significant:

Video conferencing is a multi-party two-way video communication system that focuses on real-time applications;

Video surveillance mainly focuses on unidirectional video applications, with real-time live monitoring and non real-time video playback applications. The X-DI3201 985210201 simultaneous traffic model is a typical aggregation type;

IPTV is mainly based on one-way on-demand, and from the characteristics of the traffic model, it mainly focuses on divergent downstream traffic; Wait a minute.

Almost every type of multimedia application has a huge and immiscible difference from other applications. But upon careful analysis, it is found that these multimedia applications have so many similarities:

Common call control signaling: SIP has become a common control signaling standard for all IP multimedia applications, whether it is video conferencing, video surveillance, IM, IPTV, etc., all without exception adopt SIP as their core control protocol;

Common media streaming: Due to various reasons, different multimedia applications adopt different video and audio coding standards, which has long been a major problem that plagues the integration and development of multimedia applications. With the standardization development of video coding, the media standards for various multimedia applications are gradually moving towards uniformity. For example, whether it is video communication applications such as video conferencing and video surveillance, or applications such as video storage and broadcasting, they are gradually transitioning towards H.264 in video encoding and decoding. H. 264 is gradually becoming a common media encoding standard for various multimedia applications;

Common device management methods: With the IPization of business, IP network device management methods have gradually been adopted by various multimedia systems, such as the introduction of SNMP management methods into device management for video conferencing and monitoring. In some multimedia operating environments, one of the technical specifications developed by TR069, also known as the “CPE Wide Area Network Management Protocol”, has been introduced;

Similar basic operations and business interface methods: Although each multimedia application has different business models, operation methods, and presentation methods, when decomposed into its “atomic operations”, the basic actions and business interfaces of these multimedia applications are also similar, such as media coding, transmission, decoding and playback, media storage, retrieval, on-demand playback, camera control, etc;

In addition, as multimedia applications, they all have a common basic software architecture and support system, such as operating system adaptation, database operations, multimedia data models, configuration management, alarm management, user management, etc.

1、 IMOS logical architecture

At the beginning of its design, IMOS abstracted various multimedia functions and data to form various models. Based on these models, X-DI3201 985210201 implemented software component sharing for various multimedia services. By combining these models with corresponding “management plugins”, “media processing plugins”, “control plugins”, and corresponding business presentation methods, various differentiated business functions are ultimately provided externally.

The IMOS platform is divided into 5 levels, from bottom to top including the OS infrastructure layer, data access layer, multimedia infrastructure layer, business logic layer, and business presentation layer; This includes 9 components: GUI component for user interaction, AS application service component and CS scheduling service component for business implementation, CC call component for signaling scheduling, MC component for media scheduling, MP component for media processing, MM component for configuration management, BP basic platform for underlying framework, and DAO database component.