Feedback architecture for multimedia systems

Multimedia applications usually manage large quantities of data in the form of frames of certain types. To ensure a flowing traffic of these frames through the network, temporal constraints must be respected when sending and receiving these frames. If the temporal constraints are not met, then the quality of service (QoS) provided to users decreases. In this paper, we exploit some results obtained in QoS management in Real-Time Databases Systems (RTDBSs), and we apply them to multimedia applications, because of similarities existing between these two fields. We propose a new method allowing to control the QoS provided to clients according to the system congestion. To this purpose, we implement a feedback architecture into a master server, allowing us to adapt the quality of service in the distributed multimedia system according to the network state.