Designing self-adaptive multimedia applications through hierarchical reconfiguration

Abstract

Distributed multimedia applications are very sensitive to resource variations. An attractive way for dealing with dynamic resource variations consists in making applications adaptive, and even self-adaptive. The objective is to grant applications the ability to observe themselves and their environment, to detect significant changes and to adjust their behavior accordingly. This issue has been the subject of several works; however the proposed solutions lack flexibility and a high-level support that eases the development of adaptive applications. This paper presents PLASMA, a component-based framework for building multimedia applications. PLASMA relies on a hierarchical composition and reconfiguration model which provides the expected support. The experimental evaluation shows that adaptation can be achieved with a very low overhead, while significantly improving QoS of multimedia applications as well as resource usage on mobile equipments. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.