Abstract:This paper describes the design and implementation of a component of the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA): the Distributed Processing Environment (DPE). TINA provides concepts, principles, models and standards for the next generation of telecommunication services. These new services take advantage of modem technologies such as high speed networks, multimedia processing, distributed objects, and component-oriented software development. The goal is to devise services that can be introduced, modified and withdrawn as soon as market demands are identified. TINA DPE provides the infrastructure necessary to distribute the service components among service users, providers and retailers. Our DPE implementation offers two basic facilities to the TINA applications: life-cycle and stream facilities. Life-cycle facilities allow distributed objects be deployed and managed transparently, while stream facilities allow application objects to exchange media flows such as audio and video flows.