Distributed Multimedia Applications, Systems and Platforms
Abstract
The variety of media types is an important feature of modern information systems. A progressive increase in network technology has provided the potential for processing multimedia information in distributed systems. Some recent applications include on-demand multimedia services such as those used for entertainment, video news distribution, interactive television, digital multimedia libraries and industrial control systems. A major problem of distributed multimedia applications is their high demand on processing power of computer systems and transmission capability of interconnecting networks. Distributed computing environments are characterized by change: heterogeneous end-systems and Quality of Service parameters may be subject to different fluctuations. Such changes bring new challenges for all distributed systems services and in particular for distributed systems platforms. So there is currently considerable interest in developing architectures to flexibly interconThe variety of media types is an important feature of modern information systems. A progressive increase in network technology has provided the potential for processing multimedia information in distributed systems. Some recent applications include on-demand multimedia services such as those used for entertainment, video news distribution, interactive television, digital multimedia libraries and industrial control systems. A major problem of distributed multimedia applications is their high demand on processing power of computer systems and transmission capability of interconnecting networks. Distributed computing environments are characterized by change: heterogeneous end-systems and Quality of Service parameters may be subject to different fluctuations. Such changes bring new challenges for all distributed systems services and in particular for distributed systems platforms. So there is currently considerable interest in developing architectures to flexibly interconnect distributed multimedia applications. Many multimedia applications, systems and support platforms have been proposed. This chapter presents a survey on these multimedia related aspects. Basic concepts, characteristics, and description of development and environment of multimedia applications are presented. This chapter derives an analysis of different aspects of investigations in the area of distributed multimedia systems. Also, it presents a global view of the requirements that these new applications impose for distributed environments.