INTERNET VIDEO-ON-DEMAND SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE-MINS

Internet is evolving to be an integrated service platform for promisin g future global information infrastructure. New multimedia services, e .g., Video-on-Demand, are expected to be provided on this platform, in conjunction with the existing rich information exchange and sharing s ervices on Internet, such as E-mail, WWW. The paper proposes a service system architecture for Video-on-Demand on Internet, named MINS (Mult imedia Internet Navigation System), which is capable of both realtime audio/video transmission and realtime and VCR like play-out. MINS is c omposed of 1) servers maintaining both audio/video program lists and c ontents, and 2) clients retrieving the programs and play-out them. The paper focuses on the communication architecture in MINS, e.g., flow c ontrol, realtime media synchronization control, and audio/video sessio n control. The performance of the prototype MINS is also evaluated in the paper.