Multimedia data delivery using network delay modeling

Most multimedia systems are by nature distributed. Stored digital media applications such as video-on-demand involve many separate clients and servers; communication applications such as videoconferencing involve users in distinct geographic locations. The retrieval of multimedia data for these applications across computer networks must be done in a timely fashion to accommodate end-to-end delay constraints, buffer space limitations, and inter-media synchronization. In this paper, we present a mechanism called thelimited a priori (LAP) scheduler which manages the retrieval of distributed multimedia data using network delay modeling. The LAP scheduler determines network load changes and estimates packet delay using a dynamic filtering algorithm. We show the bounds of accuracy for this technique and describe its suitability with respect to digital media traffic across a general-purpose network.Portions of this paper were presented at the 18th Annual Conference on Local Computer Networks, Minneapolis, MN, September 1993. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9211165.