Resource negotiation for collaborative multimedia presentations

Distributed multimedia document systems and distributed video servers are examples of multimedia presentations involving collaboration among multiple information sources. In such applications, objects have to be retrieved from their sources and presented to users according to specified temporal relationships. Object retrieval in these collaborative applications is influenced by the presentation times, durations and network throughput available to their sources. Replication of objects amongst the set of collaborating systems gives a choice for object retrieval. We present a graph-search based algorithm for computing and negotiating throughput requirements of collaborating multimedia presentations with replicated objects. This algorithm optimizes the number of cached objects (that have already been played) for handling operations like reverse presentation.