RACE MARS PROJECT FOR THE EXPERIMENTATION OF MULTIMEDIA INTERACTIVE SERVICES - ARCHITECTURE SOLUTIONS AND RESULTS

This paper describes the architecture implemented in five different co untries to validate, by means of tests carried out with expert users, a sec-vice architecture for the interactive retrieval of multimedia in formation. The service architecture definition (which corresponds to t he DAVIC 1.0 Specifications) and all activities for the set-up and run ning of the experiments, have been carried out within the RACE R2120 ' 'Multimedia Audiovisual Retrieval Services'' (MARS) project. A unique server and terminal architecture has been developed and put in operati on at each site, while a combination of different public network solut ions were used for the terminal access side. All national experiments made use of an ATM-based transport network. The interconnections betwe en the five countries were provided by the European ATM Pilot (EAP). T he minimal testbed configuration implemented in each country consisted of one server and two terminals. After the integration and test phase s, this configuration was extensively tested within the national envir onment to obtain the users' perception of the service.