Storage and synchronization for distributed continuous media

Advances in local area ATM networking make it possible to integrate digital audio and video, or continuous media (CM), into distributed computing environments. The temporal nature of CM introduces new requirements for acceptable end-to-end delay and jitter. This and an increased demand for bandwidth affect the design of modern, general purpose, operating systems. This paper addresses distributed system support for CM applications, focusing on the design and implementation of facilities for secondary storage and synchronization. We describe the relevant issues, along with details of our research project and its relationship to existing work. We emphasize experimentation and present results obtained with a prototype in an ATM testbed. These provide fresh insights into the role of operating system support for multimedia.