A market-based economic model for multi-media object storage and distribution

Unlike conventional text-based information, media objects such as audio, video, images, graphics, are much larger in size. The recent proliferation of World-Wide Web multimedia compound documents on the Internet has resulted in ever escalating network traffic, whose rate will not be sustainable for long before encountering serious performance problems. We have devised an integrated framework covering aspects of both data storage and data distribution of multimedia objects. Our approach uses a market-based economic model incorporating four economic paradigms (i.e. client-consultant, landlord-tenant, carrier-passenger, and franchisor-franchisee paradigms) to handle policies of data caching, replication and migration. Our approach is novel in that: (1) it provides an automatic way for managing multimedia objects in a decentralized fashion, and (2) it is object-centric and thus allows providers and users of objects to contribute to the object distribution policies using the same market pricing mechanisms that also govern storage and distribution of the multimedia objects themselves.