Multimedia Presentation Servers: Buffer Management and Admission Control

Most multimedia servers reported in the literature are designed to serve multiple and independent video/audio streams. We think that, in the future, multimedia servers will also serve complete presentations. A multimedia presentation contains explicitly specified synchronization information describing when each multimedia data needs to be delivered in the playout of the presentation. Multimedia presentations provide unique opportunities to develop algorithms for buffer management and admission control, as execution-time consumption requirements of presentations are known a priori. In this paper, we examine presentations in three different domains (heavyweight, middleweight, and lightweight presentations) and provide buffer management and admission control algorithms for the three domains. We propose two improvements (flattening and dynamic-adjustments) on the schedules created for the heavyweight presentations. Results from a simulation environment for the proposed algorithms are also presented.