Communication support for a distributed hypermedia system

A distributed multimedia information system should support retrieval of both static and time-dependent continuous media. The isochronous nature of continuous media imposes a very strict requirement on communication support, in terms of bandwidth, delay and delay jitter. This paper first introduces a distributed hypermedia system (DHS) being developed. It shows that in order to support the retrieval of continuous media of arbitrary length, communication bandwidth, delay bound and delay jitter bound must be guaranteed. The authors then present experiences and results of their initial implementation of the system on UNIX workstations connected via Ethernet. Finally, they evaluate the suitability of the current platform and present their future work plan.