Maintaining multimedia information quality in distributed environments with resource poor computers: using machine independence to send dynamic methods to adapt with the dynamic media data

The explosion in the use of Internet technology has heralded a new era in computer-based communication, however this technology is limited by the inflexibility of this architecture and its fixed connectivity. The last few years have seen a rise in the provision of devices for inter-personal communication. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), laptops, and networked computers. These devices have many advantages, particularly mobility, but tend to be resource poor in terms of bandwidth, memory and software. The challenge is to integrate this newly emerging mobile technology with the existing legacy systems in order to explore their latent power. This means that new methods and techniques are required to overcome this lack of resources while still delivering the highest possible information quality. In this work we show how machine independence can be used to aid in the maintenance of information quality by augmenting the functionality of the client/server relationship, in particular for challenging applications such as multimedia communication. We have achieved this by extending the relationship to include dynamic (run-time) distributed configuration so that quality based configuration at the server end can be properly exploited, and intermediate distributed services, such as information filtering used to reduce bandwidth requirements, can be more easily utilised. This method has shown us much promise in allowing resources to be used in a distributed manner and overcome the problem of maintaining information quality in resource poor end computer system environments.