Streaming multimedia presentations in distributed database environments

There has been increasing interest in flexibly constructing and manipulating heterogeneous presentations from multimedia data resources [34] to support sophisticated applications [26]. In these applications, information from multimedia data resources at one location must be made available at other remote locations for purposes of collaborative engineering, educational learning and tutoring, interactive computer-based training, electronic technical manuals and distributed publishing. Such applications require that basic multimedia objects be stored in multimedia databases/files. The multimedia objects, such as audio samples, video clips, images and animation, are then selectively retrieved, transmitted and composed for customized presentations. In order to support these advanced applications, novel approaches to network-based computing are needed to position adaptive quality-of-service (QoS) management as its central architectural principle. One of the key problems is to design the end system software to be coupled to the network interface. Also, in the besteffort network environment such as Internet, the transmission of media data may experience large variations in available bandwidth, latency and latency variance. Consequently, network delays may occur in the delivery of media data. To meet the demands of the advanced applications over the Internet in the realworld, end system software must have the ability to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve multimedia data. Fundamental principles and advanced techniques need be developed with which one can design an end system software to be integrated with the network to support sophisticated and customized multimedia applications.