Resource Management in Networked Multimedia Systems

• Authors: Klara Nahrstedt;Ralf Steinmetz
• Venue: Computer
• Year: 1995

The objective of error-free multimedia processing and communication it to manipulate and transmit media under time constraints by providing guaranteed services such as the colloquial telephone. Hence, the control-management level of the host and underlying network architectures has become a key issue of any distributed multimedia system. This paper discusses 'resource management' at the host and network level, and their cooperation to achieve global guaranteed transmission and presentation services, which means end-to-end guarantees. The emphasis is on 'host resources' (e.g., CPU processing time) and 'network resources' (e.g., bandwidth, buffer space) which need to be controlled in order to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements set by users of a networked multimedia system. The control of the specified resources involves three actions: to properly allocate resources (end-to-end) during the multimedia call establishment, so that traffic may flow according to the QoS specification; to control resource allocation during the multimedia data transmission; to adapt to changes when degradation of a system components' capacity occurs. These actions imply the necessity of: (a) new services, such as admission control, at the hosts and intermediate network nodes; (b) new protocols for establishing connections which satisfy QoS requirements along the path from sender to receiver(s), such as a resource reservation protocol; (c) new mechanisms for delay, rate, and error control; (d) new resource monitoring protocols for reporting system changes; (e) new adaptive schemes for dynamic resource allocation to respond to system changes; and (f) new architectures in the hosts and switches to accommodate the resource management entities. This article gives an overview of services, mechanisms and protocols for resource management as outlined above.