A distributed mobile multimedia operating system

Abstract

Mobile devices suffer many limitations that make developing and executing interactive multimedia applications challenging. This paper describes a distributed mobile multimedia operating system that provides total application scalability and portability across many different handsets by distributing key processing and resource management tasks to servers. The system has built-in support for multimedia data, providing synchronisation services and capability based media transcoding and it automatically handles dynamic and continuous data sources. Unlike classical compile-link-execute operating models of many systems, this one utilises a just-in-time incremental compiler and a streaming linker in conjunction with a thin, object-oriented virtual machine. The client virtual machine negotiates its capabilities with the server that correspondingly customises and incrementally compiles multimedia applications during run-time, while automatically updating live data resources in the application and streaming continuous multimedia data.