Reliability Modeling and Analysis of Modern Distributed Interactive Multimedia Applications: A Case Study of a Distributed Opera Performance

With the increase in processing power of computers, proliferation of specialized software and hardware, and the availability of greater communications bandwidth, it is possible to deploy more demanding modern Distributed Interactive Multimedia Applications such as World Opera. The World Opera application realizes the vision of a distributed real-time opera performance in which artists who are distributed around the globe are interacting with each other as though they were co-located. The application is driven by the artistic consortium that encompasses several major opera houses worldwide. In this paper, we build a high-level reliability model to predict the system reliability of the deployed architecture for supporting World Opera. Furthermore, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to understand the reliability requirements that individual components need to meet in order to provide desired system reliability.