Mobile Agent-Based Services for Real-Time Multimedia Content Delivery

Technologies and applications that enable multi-party, multimedia communications are becoming more and more pervasive in every facet of daily lives: from distance learning to remote job training, from peer-to-peer conferencing to distributed virtual meetings. To effectively use the evolving Internet infrastructure as ubiquitously accessible platform for the delivery of multi-faceted multimedia services, not only are advances in multimedia communications required but also novel software infrastructures are to be designed to cope with network and end-system heterogeneity, improve management and control of multimedia distributed services, and deliver sustainable QoS levels to end users. In this chapter, the authors propose a holistic approach based on agent-oriented middleware integrating active services, mobile event-driven agents, and multimedia internetworking technology for the component-based prototyping, dynamic deployment, and management of Internet-based real-time multimedia services. The proposed approach is enabled by a distributed software infrastructure (named Mobile Agent Multimedia Space – MAMS) based on event-driven mobile agents and multimedia coordination spaces. In particular, a multimedia coordination space is a component-based architecture consisting of components (players, streamers, transcoders, dumper, forwarders, archivers, GUI adapters, multimedia timers) that provide basic real-time multimedia services. The event-driven mobile agents act as orchestrators of the multimedia space and are capable of migrating across the network to dynamically create and deploy complex media services. The effectiveness and potential of the proposed approach are described through a case study involving the on-demand deployment and management of an adaptive cooperative playback service.