A two-tier technique for authoring distributed multimedia applications

Distributed multimedia systems have stringent quality of service requirements which make them difficult to specify and implement. These include near-real-time constraints and synchronization requirements as well as complex user interaction patterns. Traditional approaches to the development of distributed multimedia applications have focused on specifying temporal constraints. Not much attention has been paid to interactive multimedia applications. The objective of this paper is to propose a two-tier approach for the development of multimedia applications which facilitates modular design. As a proof of concept, a prototype with runtime support has been developed and used to construct several non-trivial distributed multimedia applications, including a videoconferencing system, a video phone system and a virtual city tour.