On-demand hypermedia/multimedia service over broadband networks

We present a unified approach for delivering hypermedia/multimedia objects over broadband networks. Documents are stored in various multimedia servers, while the inline data may reside in their own media servers, attached to the multimedia servers. The described service consists of several multimedia servers and a set of functions that intend to present to the end user interactive information in real time. Users interact with the service requesting multimedia documents on demand. Various media streams are transmitted over different parallel connections according to their transmission requirements. The hypermedia documents are structured using a hypermedia markup language that keeps information of the spatio temporal relationships among document's media components. In order to deal with the variant network behavior, buffering manipulation mechanisms and grading of the transmitted media quality techniques are proposed to smooth presentation and synchronization anomalies.