MULTIMEDIA DATA DELIVERY USING NETWORK DELAY MODELING

Most multimedia systems ate by nature distributed. Stored digital medi a applications such as video-on-demand involve many separate clients a nd servers; communication applications such as videoconferencing invol ve 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 s pace limitations, and inter-media synchronization. In this paper, we p resent a mechanism called the limited a priori (LAP) scheduler which m anages the retrieval of distributed multimedia data using network dela y modeling. The LAP scheduler determines network load changes and esti mates packet delay using a dynamic filtering algorithm. We show the bo unds of accuracy for this technique and describe its suitability with respect to digital media traffic across a general-purpose network.