Handling QoS negotiations in orchestrated multimedia presentations

With the growth in multimedia applications, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of these applications and derive the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The multiple media streams and the synchronization across the media underline each application and its QoS requirements. These are normally negotiated upfront with the network service provider in the form of hard or soft guarantees. But the flow sequence of the streams, their interrelationships and the QoS may be affected by the changes made by the network service provider or the user interaction. This necessitates a systematic study of generic requirements of typical multimedia applications and specification of generic solutions in the form of protocol services in any network. This paper addresses these concerns by studying the network QoS requirements of multimedia presentation application. We use the idea of streams to characterize the multimedia application. An application sub-layer protocol called Multimedia Application Protocol (MMAP), which uses runtime support algorithms and provides services for QoS negotiation and for handling user interaction, is proposed. We present an example from orchestrated multimedia applications to show as to how the MMAP services can be used for implementing distributed multimedia applications.