A multi-level buffering and feedback scheme for distributed multimedia presentation systems

Distributed multimedia presentation systems require flexibility and good quality of service for multimedia data presentations. To ensure flexible and satisfiable presentations of multimedia data, collaborations between servers, network, and clients must be carefully designed to retrieve the data from the disk and transfer the data to the client. In this paper we investigate a multi-level buffering and feedback scheme to guarantee the on-time retrieval and transmission of multimedia data in the distributed multimedia presentation environments. In the multi-level buffering scheme, both client and server buffers are designed and collaborated to support the end-to-end multimedia data transmission. These buffers can absorb the rate variations of media streams in different locations. Local and remote feedback messages are used to dynamically prevent buffer overflow/underflow problems. Experiments demonstrate that highly smooth and synchronized presentations of multimedia streams can be supported.