An adaptive architecture for multi-stream authoring and presentations in distributed networks

New global trends in communications technology and liberalization are forcing dramatic changes in our lives. Applications tend to be lightweight and mobile, resulting in greater convenience. We present a new architecture to advance the traditional authoring system towards these trends. In the proposed architecture, the authoring system is capable of editing media content distributed in the networks. It forms a new model of authoring, i.e., the distributed authoring model. The distributed authoring model is described and compared with the traditional authoring model. We introduce quality-on-demand streaming in the architecture for the purpose of distributed authoring. Furthermore, we address the problems of applying multiple source streaming and quality adaptation in the architecture and show our design for resolving these problems. An implementation conforming to this architecture is also described.