Enabling Technology for Distributed Multimedia Applications

In September 1993, the Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research, in collaboration with the IBM Toronto Laboratory Centre for Advanced Studies, initiated a major project on Broadband Services. The goal of this major project is to provide the software technologies required for the development of distributed multimedia applications. Of particular interest are \presentational" applications where multimedia documents, stored in database servers, are retrieved by remote users over a broadband network. Emphasis is placed on e ciency and service exibility. By e ciency, we mean the ability to support many users and many multimedia documents. As to service exibility, we mean the application is able to support a wide range of quality of service requirements from the users, adapt to changing network conditions, and support multiple document types. The research program consists of six constituent projects: multimedia data management, continuous media le server, quality of service negotiation and adaptation, scalable video encoding, synchronization of multimedia data, and project integration. These projects are investigated by a multi-disciplinary team from eight institutions across Canada. Multimedia news has been selected as a target application for development, and the results from the various projects have been integrated into a multimedia news prototype. In this paper, the system architecture, research results, and the prototyping e ort, are presented.