Design and implementation of a cooperative multimedia environment with QoS control

The spread of distributed multimedia applications is setting forth a new set of challenges in the management of host and network resources for guaranteeing QUALITY AND SERVICE (QoS). When the multimedia applications compete for resources, as in the case of a cooperative multimedia environment, the management task becomes even more difficult.We have developed a cooperative multimedia environment (CME) that manages multimedia services and the underlying resources in an integrated way. Each user is provided with a single interface to invite other users to a cooperative session, select the media services to be used in the session, and specify his QoS requirements for the media services throughout the session. In this work, we describe the architectural details of the CME and its components with particular emphasis on the QoS mapping and QoS control mechanism. We also present the design and implementation details of an experimental prototype that provides video, audio and white board services. q 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.