Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The aim is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices.

Presents a consistent picture of multimedia technology issues Stresses on the integrated aspects of multimedia systems Broad understanding of multimedia operating systems and applications Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Prof. Ralf Steinmetz worked for over nine years in industrial research and development of distributed multimedia systems and applications. Since 1996 he is the head of the Multimedia Communications Lab at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. From 1997 to 2001 he directed the Fraunhofer (former GMD) Integrated Publishing Systems Institute IPSI in Darmstadt. In 1999 he founded the Hessian Telemedia Technology Competence Center (httc e.V.).

His thematic focus in research and teaching is on multimedia communications with his vision of real "seamless multimedia communications". With over 200 refereed publications he has become ICCC Governor in 1999; was awarded the ranking of Fellow of both, the IEEE in 1999 and the ACM in 2002. ** Prof. Klara Nahrstedt** is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Over the last ten years she has been working on various research problems in the area of Quality of Service provisioning for real-time multimedia processing and communication systems and published over 100 papers in leading conferences and journals. She is the editor-in-chief of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Journal, as well as she has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Computer Networks Journal, Journal on Multimedia Applications and Tools, and ACM Computer Communication Review Journal.

For her research results she was awarded the Early NSF Career Award, the Junior Xerox Award, IEEE Communication Society Leonard Abraham Award for Research Achievements, and the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professorship Chair.

Klappentext

The goal of Multimedia Systems is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner. A user can enjoy a multimedia application only if all the pieces of the end-to-end solution fit together. This means that a multimedia application must be developed in integrated fashion, taking into account the underlying technology described here.

In this volume, we present fundamental characteristics and properties of multimedia operating and communication systems. Of special interest to readers will be those chapters dealing with scheduling algorithms and other OS-supporting approaches for multimedia applications, with their soft-real-time deadlines; multimedia file system internals and servers, with their decision algorithms for data placement and scheduling; multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols and services, with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service awareness and adaptive algorithms; synchronization services, with their skew control methods; and group communications, with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

Ralf Steinmetz is Professor of Multimedia Communications at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, and he is chairman of the Board of the Telemedia Center httc.. Together with more than 20 researchers, he is working towards his vision of "truly seamless multimedia communications". He has co-authored over 200 refereed publications, serves as a member of the board of numerous professional committees, is an ICCC Governor, and is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM.

Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor at the department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urban-Champagne, USA. She is an expert in the area of multimedia systems and networks and focuses on quality of service management problems. Currently, she serves as the editor-in-chief of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.- 2 Quality of Service.- 3 Multimedia Operating Systems.- 4 Media Server.- 5 Networks.- 6 Communication.- 7 Group Communication.- 8 Synchronization.