End-system architecture for distributed networked multimedia applications: issues, trends and future directions

The emerging broadband computer networks (wired and wireless) are likely to have numerous multimedia applications, such as videoconferencing, interactive games, and collaborative computing standard features in desktop PCs and portables. In recent years there have been significant developments in the field of multimedia coding algorithms and their VLSI implementations along with the development of high speed networking technology (e.g., ATM, FDDI, fast Ethernet). But the end-system architecture (software and hardware) as a whole is lagging behind these advancements. Optimized hardware and software architectures are needed for end systems that will guarantee predictable performance of real-time multimedia applications according to user provided QoS. In this paper, we identify the major end-system hardware and software requirements for networked multimedia applications. Focusing mainly on hardware and operating system levels, we advocate an integrated end-system architecture rather than some ad-hoc solutions for real-time multimedia computing, in addition to general purpose computing in a distributed environment. A core-based system architecture is proposed. We observe that interfacing with high speed networks, inter-device level data transfer, power efficiency and in addition, system resource utilization are some of the issues that need serious consideration in an end-system architecture.