SYSTEM SUPPORT FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS - AN ASSESSMENT OF THE STATE-OF-THE-ART

With recent advances in networking and workstation technology, a varie ty of distributed multimedia applications are now becoming feasible, e .g. multimedia desktop conferencing and distance learning. However, th e deployment of such applications has so far been rather limited. In t he authors' opinion this limited deployment is largely explained by th e immature state of distributed multimedia system support technologies rather than a lack of creativity on the part of application developer s. The present paper therefore attempts to increase awareness of the r elevant support technology issues by presenting a discussion of the st ate of the art in the key technologies of multimedia communications an d distributed systems. It is argued that, while significant advances h ave been made on specific topics such as high performance transport pr otocols and real-time process scheduling in operating systems, conside rable research is still required to produce a complete, integrated sol ution to the support of distributed multimedia applications.