QUALITY OF SERVICE NEGOTIATION FOR ORCHESTRATED, DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION

Multimedia presentation is an application wherein the information is brought from different sources and presented to the multimedia workstation of the user. How does an orchestrated, distributed multimedia presentation application negotiate its Quality of Service (QoS) requirements with the network service provider? This paper addresses this question and presents solution based on the temporal relationships between the objects composing the presentation, for determining and negotiating the QoS requirements. In an orchestrated multimedia presentation, the temporal relationships between the objects composing the presentation are formulated explicitly a priori. The initial QoS requirements depend on the type of multimedia objects and their temporal relationships. User going through the presentation can change the presentation sequence dynamically by giving various inputs such as skip or reverse presentation or scale the speed of presentation or change the spatial requirements. These user interactions dynamically modify the QoS requirements. Also, the network service provider can dynamically modify the offered QoS. Under these conditions, we find that the preformulated temporal relationships can be effectively used for deriving the new QoS requirements and then the application can negotiate the requirements with the network. We present algorithms for deriving the preferred and acceptable QoS values which can be used for negotiation. We also give algorithms for handling user interactions and dynamic behaviour of the network service provider. Finally, we present a Finite State Machine model to describe the QoS negotiation process for an orchestrated, distributed multimedia presentation with user participation. This model can be used for designing the multimedia presentation application.