Analyzing multimedia streaming in a distributed environment

The recent developments of gigabit networks and high speed computer technologies offer numerous opportunities to support future multimedia applications. Desktop audio and video opens many exciting possibilities, but also raises serious challenges on the network in terms of bandwidth, quality of service guarantee, latency, synchronization, resource reservation, and cost. User interaction is at the core of future multimedia systems. Distributed systems, multi-participant applications, and multicast streaming are essential requirements of multimedia system architecture. This paper is a contribution to analyze the multimedia system architecture in three main dimensions. The first dimension comprises components associated with multimedia data structures and characteristics. Data streaming, synchronization issues, implementation techniques, algorithms, and protocols are the second dimension. The third dimension comprises quality of service, pricing and resource reservation protocols. Finally, we present our project to implement a streaming and broadcasting network over the university LAN. Media synchronization is not the only important factor to be considered with this system. QoS considerations, resource negotiation and cost are main issues to be studied, not to forget the human factor as an essential element in the future multimedia system architecture.