NetMedia: a client-server distributed multimedia environment

Advances in multimedia computing technologies offer new approaches to support on-line accesses to information from a variety of sources such as video clips, audio, images, and books. A client-server distributed multimedia system would be a practical approach to support such functionalities. We present the design and implementation of a client-server distributed multimedia database environment that can be used to support large digital libraries. System architecture and design are described. Server functionalities, including client scheduling, data buffering and admission control, are investigated. A client request can only be admitted if both the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements from the client and the upper bound on total buffer consumption at the server are maintained.