Presentation lag reduction by scheduling media objects for auto-assembled multimedia presentations from educational digital libraries

Abstract

This study investigates the optimization of the ordering of retrieved media objects from educational multimedia repositories for a continuously-played presentation such that the total presentation lag through a slow network is minimized. We present a computation-efficient NEH-based heuristic algorithm that can obtain a near-optimal solution with minimal computation time. A simulation experiment shows the average gaps between the idle rate of heuristic solutions and randomly generated sequences are around 26.3%. The results indicate the proposed heuristic solution can significantly reduce the presentation lag as compared to a random ordering approach that is commonly applied in conventional multimedia repositories. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.