Flexible multimedia system architecture with adaptive QoS guarantee functions

Proposes a flexible multimedia system (FMS) which is based on an agent-oriented architecture. The system is able to organize the required functions itself, and to provide both real-time and stored multimedia information services simultaneously to users, even though various users´ multimedia environments and the resource utility of the computers or networks have been dynamically changed. This distributed multimedia system not only integrates various multimedia information distributed over computer networks but it also provides that information to the users in accordance with their requirements during real-time multimedia communication which must guarantee the user-requested quality of service (QoS), even though the computer and network resources may change statically or dynamically. This paper describes the FMS architecture for a multimedia teleconferencing service with adaptive QoS-guarantee functions, and designs the FMS so as to implement a prototype system. In this teleconferencing service, the FMS is able to realize one of the multimedia communication services flexibly for service requests and QoS requests from users