RESOURCE-MANAGEMENT IN NETWORKED MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS

Multimedia computing and communications are imposing new transfer and delivery requirements on network system components. Hence, the control -management level of the host and underlying network architectures has become a key issue in any distributed multimedia system. This article discusses resource management at the host and network level to achiev e global guaranteed transmission and presentation services--that is, e nd-to-end guarantees. The emphasis is on host resources (such as CPU p rocessing time) and network resources (such as bandwidth and buffer sp ace) that need to be controlled to satisfy quality-of-service (QoS) re quirements set by users of networked multimedia systems. Controlling t he specified resources involves three actions: (1) allocating resource s (end-to-end) during multimedia call establishment so that traffic ca n flow according to the QoS specification, (2) controlling resource al location during multimedia data transmission, and (3) adapting to chan ges caused by degradation of a system component's capacity. These acti ons imply the need for (1) new services, such as admission control at the hosts and intermediate network nodes; (2) new protocols for establ ishing connections that satisfy QoS requirements along the path from s ender to receiver(s), such as a resource reservation protocol; (3) new mechanisms for delay, rate, and error control; (4) new resource monit oring protocols for reporting system changes; (5) new adaptive schemes for dynamic resource allocation to respond to system changes; and (6) new architectures in the hosts and switches to accommodate the resour ce management entities. The article gives an overview of services, mec hanisms, and protocols for resource management.