Performance issues of multimedia applications

Abstract

The dissemination of the Internet technologies, increasing communication bandwidth and processing speeds, and the growth in demand for multimedia information gave rise to a variety of applications. Many of these applications demand the transmission of a continuous flow of data in real time. As such, continuous media applications may have high storage requirements, high bandwidth needs and strict delay and loss requirements. These pose significant challenges to the design of such systems, specially since the Internet currently provides no QoS guarantees to the data it delivers. An extensive range of problems have been investigated in the last years from issues on how to efficiently store and retrieve continuous media information in large systems, to issues on how to efficiently transmit the retrieved information via the Internet. Although broad in scope, the problems under investigation are tightly coupled. The purpose of this chapter is to survey some of the techniques proposed to cope with these challenges.