DMTS: A Distributed Multimedia Teleworking System

Multimedia systems combine a variety of information sources, such as voice, graphics, animation, images, and full-motion video, into a wide range of applications. The paper initially categorizes existing multimedia applications into three classes: noninteractive-oriented, interactive-oriented client-server-based, and interactive-oriented peer-party-based. In particular, the paper examines interactive-oriented applications and provides an in-depth survey of the media synchronization problem for the design of these applications. The paper then presents our prototyping system, called the Distributed Multimedia Teleworking System (DMTS), which allows two or more remote systems in collaboration to access and modify multimedia data through a network in a fully synchronous fashion. The system has been developed over TCP/IP and an FDDI network, using an XVideo D/A card. The media supported by DMTS include text, graphics, voice, and video. DMTS employs a master-slave collaboration model to maintain the coherence of the text and graphics data being simultaneously modified. Moreover, DMTS also adopts effective mechanisms to reduce skew (asynchrony) and jitter delays between video and voice streams. Finally, the paper demonstrates that DMTS achieves a maximum throughput of 13 frames per second, and reveals that the throughput bottleneck resides in the hardware capture and D/A processing of video frames.