Using distributed servers to provide distributed home theatre services

The advent of traffic integration has opened avenues for countless multimedia applications. Among the most promising applications are video-conference and video-on-demand. Video-conferences extends current voice-conference by allowing participants to see their body language and to use visual information. Users of a video-on-demand system can select and watch films from video archives. In this paper, we consider distributed home theatre (DHT), a hybrid application in which a film is simultaneously played for the participants of a video-conference. The basic idea is to allow a group of distributed users to discuss a film. In a DHT session, any participant can initiate a debate about a specific scene by performing VCR operations on the video. It is expected that distributed home theatre will have a great impact on distance-learning as well as on professional conferences. Video applications like DHT will require huge bandwidth resources in the future broadband integrated network. In this paper, we investigate the design of networks with distributed servers to provide DHT services, and reduce the huge bandwidth demand of distributed video services. A distributed server is a set of identical servers which cooperate during a DHT session. In other words, the servers involved in a DHT session exchange control messages, so that all the participants of a session watch the same scene. Different servers deliver video streams for a different participant (or group of participants) of the same session. Furthermore, we consider server/cache replication techniques and we comment on the use of distributed servers in networks with multicast.