JINSIL: A Middleware for Presentation of Composite Multimedia Objects in a Distributed Environment

In a distributed environment, presentation of structured, composite multimedia information poses new challenges in dealing with variable bandwidth (BW) requirement and synchronization of media data objects. The detailed knowledge of BW requirement obtained by analyzing the document structure can be used to create a prefetch schedule that results in efficient utilization of system resources. A distributed environment consists of various system components that are either dedicated to a client or shared across multiple clients. Shared system components could benefit from Fine Granularity Advanced Reservation (FAGAR)of resources based on true BW requirement. Prefetching by utilizing advance knowledge of BW requirement can further improve resource utilization. The prefetch schedule needs also to be aware of the BW fragmentation in a partitioned server. In this paper, we describe JINSIL middleware for retrieval of a composite document that takes into account the available bandwidth and buffer resources and the nature of sharing in each component on the delivery path. It reshapes BW requirement, creates prefetch schedule for efficient resource utilization in each component, and reserves necessary BW and buffer. We also consider good choices for placement of prefetch buffers across various system components.