Project Overview:
Distributed Multimedia Systems
A multimedia system is characterized by the integrated
generation, manipulation, presentation, storage and communication of
independent discrete (DM) and continuous (CM) media.
Unlike the discrete media such as text and graphics,
CM requires special support for being processed or displayed.
Because CM data has to be available within a certain time interval to be
useful for an application, it has to be handled in a
timely fashion to avoid gaps or jitter, and has to be presented to or
obtained from I/O devices at certain rates to fulfill their
operational requirements.
Most multimedia computing systems have to provide real-time mechanisms,
at least to a certain degree, to handle CM data properly.
The essential problem of multimedia is not of providing support for
individual media, rather support for "synchronizing" the otherwise autonomous
data transfers across computers.
The issue of real-time and synchronization mechanisms become even more
challenging in distributed systems as the different media streams may arrive
from different sources.
We have been looking into the various approaches for
achieving synchronization in a distributed environment and have
investigated mechanisms which can guarantee synchronization of
streams not only "in parallel", but of all the possible temporal
constructs among the various media streams.
Other Projects:
[Starbase]
[Security]
[Predict]
[Schedule]
[Multimedia]
[Dependability]
Last modified: Mon Oct 2 18:34:05 EDT 1995 [SK]