DMTS: a distributed multimedia teleworking system

Multimedia systems combine a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, music, and full-motion video, into a wide range of applications. The paper initially categorizes existing multimedia applications into three classes: non-interactive-oriented, interactive-oriented client-server-based, and interactive-oriented peer-party-based applications. In particular, the paper examines interactive-oriented applications and provides an in-depth survey of the media synchronization problem for the design of these applications. The paper then presents our Distributed Multimedia Teleworking System (DMTS) prototype, which allows two or more remote systems in collaboration to access and modify multimedia data through a network in a fully synchronous fashion. The system was developed over TCP/IP on an FDDI network, using an XVideo D/A card. The media supported by DMTS include text, graphics, voice, and video. For text and graphics, to maintain the coherence of the data being simultaneously modified, DMTS employs a master-slave collaboration model between the two remote systems. Moreover, DMTS also adopts effective mechanisms to reduce skew (asynchrony) and jitter delays between video and voice data streams. Finally, the paper demonstrates that DMTS achieves a maximum throughput of 13 frames per second and the throughput bottleneck resides in the hardware capture and the D/A processing of video frames