Distributed multimedia systems

Multimedia systems will allow professionals worldwide to collaborate more effectively and to travel substantially less. But for multimedia systems to be effective, a good systems infrastructure is essential. In particular, support is needed for global and consistent sharing of information, for long-distance, high-bandwidth multimedia interpersonal communication, greatly enhanced reliability and availability, and security. These systems will also need to be easily usable by lay computer users. \ud In this paper we explore the operating system support that these multimedia systems must have in order to do the job properly

Distributed multimedia systems

A distributed multimedia system (DMS) is an integrated communication, computing, and information system that enables the processing, management, delivery, and presentation of synchronized multimedia information with quality-of-service guarantees. Multimedia information may include discrete media data, such as text, data, and images, and continuous media data, such as video and audio. Such a system enhances human communications by exploiting both visual and aural senses and provides the ultimate flexibility in work and entertainment, allowing one to collaborate with remote participants, view movies on demand, access on-line digital libraries from the desktop, and so forth. In this paper, we present a technical survey of a DMS. We give an overview of distributed multimedia systems, examine the fundamental concept of digital media, identify the applications, and survey the important enabling technologies.published_or_final_versio

Quality of service in distributed multimedia systems

The Unix operating system made a vital contribution to information technology by introducing the notion of composing complicated applications out of simple ones by means of pipes and shell scripts. One day, this will also be possible with multimedia applications. Before this can happen, however, operating systems must support multimedia in as general a way as Unix now supports ordinary applications. Particularly, attention must be paid to allowing the operating-system service to degrade gracefully under heavy loads.\ud This paper presents the Quality-of-Service architecture of the Huygens project. This architecture provides the mechanisms that allow applications to adapt the level of their service to the resources the operating system can make available

Systems for the Nineties - Distributed Multimedia Systems

We live at the dawn of the information age. The capabilities of computers to store and look up information are only just beginning to be exploited. As little as ten years ago, practically all the information stored in computers was entered and retrieved in the form of text. Today, we are just starting to use other means of communicating information between people and machines -- computers can now scan images, they can record sound, they can produce synthesized speech, and they can show two- and three-dimensional images of spatial data. The realization that we are still at the beginning of the information age comes when we notice the vast difference between the way in which people interact with each other and the way in which people can interact with (or through) machines. When people communicate, they tend to use speech, gestures, touch, even smell; they draw pictures on the white board, they use text, pictures, photos, graphs, sometimes even video presentations. nterpersonal communication is truly multimedia communication in that it makes use of all our senses

Analysis of a Multimedia Stream using Stochastic Process Algebra

It is now well recognised that the next generation of distributed systems will be distributed multimedia systems. Central to multimedia systems is quality of service, which defines the non-functional requirements on the system. In this paper we investigate how stochastic process algebra can be used in order to determine the quality of service properties of distributed multimedia systems. We use a simple multimedia stream as our basic example. We describe it in the Stochastic Process Algebra PEPA and then we analyse whether the stream satisfies a set of quality of service parameters: throughput, end-to-end latency, jitter and error rates

Distributed Multimedia Systems Research Prospectus

Distributed multimedia computing and communiation systems combine computer systems, networks and distributed software to facilitate applications that enable and enhance collaborative work, direct interpersonal communication, remote access to information and real-time presentation of information from a variety of sources. Over the next decade, we expect such systems to become central to the infrastructure of our increasingly information-driven society. This prospectus describes a program of research being pursued within the Computer and Communications Research Center of Washington University and the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. This program seeks to promote the creation of effective distributed multimedia systems and develop the fundamental understanding needed to determine how such systems can be best designed and used

A Framework for Quality-Driven Delivery in Distributed Multimedia Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for Quality-Driven Delivery (QDD) in distributed multimedia environments. Quality-driven delivery refers to the capacity of a system to deliver documents, or more generally objects, while considering the users expectations in terms of non-functional requirements. For this QDD framework, we propose a model-driven approach where we focus on QoS information modeling and transformation. QoS information models and meta-models are used during different QoS activities for mapping requirements to system constraints, for exchanging QoS information, for checking compatibility between QoS information and more generally for making QoS decisions. We also investigate which model transformation operators have to be implemented in order to support some QoS activities such as QoS mapping

MULTIMEDIA STREAMING PLATFORM BANDWITH CONTROLL CONGESTION DETECTION AND BANDWIDTH ADAPTATION

We propose a platform for distributed multimedia systems. The proposed platform is implemented using the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) and the Cross-Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM). This ensures system portability, flexibility and performance. The platform is equipped with a congestion detection algorithm and a bandwidth control mechanism thus controlling the transfer rates between the communication parties. Using this kind of bandwidth management this platform allows real-time streaming across multiple networks.real-time multimedia platform; XPCOM components; congestion detection; bandwidth control