A biologically inspired framework for multimedia service management in a ubiquitous environment

This paper addresses several key issues in distributed multimedia services management and composition such as scalability, heterogeneity, and quality of service (QoS). The proposed framework introduces biologically inspired multimedia service management through the composition of basic multimedia services such as streaming services and different transcoding services. The biologically inspired approach is used for collecting the QoS requirements from individual transcoding services in order to select the most suitable services for the desired composition process. A prototype of the proposed framework is designed, implemented, and evaluated in terms of scalability and load balancing. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.