Scheduling multimedia documents in a distributed system

In a client-server based distributed multimedia system, requests for multimedia documents arrive sporadically. These requests must be served by delivering the requested multimedia documents with a fast response time and ensure a certain quality of service. This requires the server to determine the transmission schedule of each multimedia stream while ensuring necessary inter - and intra-stream synchronizations. The multimedia server has to generate schedules in real-time for multiple requests. Therefore, the scheduling algorithm must incur small execution cost. In this paper, we propose a number of dynamic heuristic algorithms. The main feature of our algorithms is that they include an embedded dynamic nature which can adjust their scheduling times for each request. If the slack time between two requests is large, the scheduler runs longer in an attempt to find a better solution. This reduces the response time while maintaining a good quality of presentation. Using simulation and analytical results, we evaluate our algorithms and demonstrate their potential to be applicable in real distributed system.