VIDEO CONFERENCING, FILE STORAGE, AND MANAGEMENT IN MULTIMEDIA COMPUTER-SYSTEMS

Technological advances in networking and storage are revolutionizing computers so as to support digital multimedia. In this paper, we present a video conferencing system that can form the basis for supporting most video interactions and services in distributed computing systems. We present powerful paradigms for collaboration such as conferences using multiple channels of video and audio, hierarchically and non-hierarchically related conferences, and develop a model and software architecture for supporting these paradigms in multimedia computer systems. We describe a implementation of the architecture based on a general event-driven message exchange mechanism, and investigate the resulting issues of control synchronization among agents. We have developed a video file server that is integrated with the conferencing architecture to provide storage and retrieval of full-motion video information within conferences. The conferencing and file systems are integrated at the agent-server level (above the operating systems, but below the user interface). The performance of the system, which has been in operation for several months, is highly satisfactory, showing the feasibility of adding a video dimension to high-performance computing.