<title>Management of time-dependent multimedia data</title>

Abstract

A number of approaches have been proposed for supporting high-bandwidth time-dependent multimedia data in a general purpose computing environment. Much of this work assumes the availability of ample resources such as CPU performance, bus, I/O, and communication bandwidth. However, many multimedia applications have large variations in instantaneous data presentation requirements (e.g., a dynamic range of order 100,000). By using a statistical scheduling approach these variations are effectively smoothed and, therefore, more applications are made viable. The result is a more efficient use of available bandwidth and the enabling of applications that have large short-term bandwidth requirements such as simultaneous video and still image retrieval. Statistical scheduling of multimedia traffic relies on accurate characterization or guarantee of channel bandwidth and delay. If guaranteed channel characteristics are not upheld due to spurious channel overload, buffer overflow and underflow can occur at the destination. The result is the loss of established source-destination synchronization and the introduction of intermedia skew. In this paper we present an overview of a proposed synchronization mechanism to limit the effects of such anomalous behavior. The proposed mechanism monitors buffer levels to detect impending low and high levels on frame basis and regulates the destination playout rate. Intermedia skew is controlled by a similar control algorithm. This mechanism is used in conjunction with a statistical source scheduling approach to provide an overall multimedia transmission and resynchronization system supporting graceful service degradation.