Meta-data modelling for quality of service (QoS) management in the World Wide Web (WWW)

Abstract

The World-Wide Web has been a remarkably successful system for distributing hypertext documents. The basic model for Web interaction is that a client requests a page of data which can include images and hyperlinks within it. This interaction model is inadequate for real-time multimedia (MM) applications, since the Web and its associated set of protocols, e.g. HTTP, do not support the real-time transfer of the continuous media (Audio/Video). Several solutions have been proposed to support real-time playout of continuous media via the Web, e.g. Netscape. Most of these solutions do not provide means to the user to negotiate the desired presentation quality (in terms of quality of service (QoS) parameters settings); even the proposals that provide QoS negotiation (more generally QoS management) are used in a rather static manner, that is, the video/audio servers are a priori known. The authors propose to integrate in the WWW a dynamic QoS management approach that allows (1) the user to negotiate the desired QoS; and (2) and to select the "best" video/audio server which might support the user requirements. This activity is based on the general structure of multimedia documents and associated QoS parameters, called meta-data, which they developed under an ongoing CITR project. The main objective of the paper is to integrate meta-data associated with MM document in WWW e.g. Netscape; this will allow one to use dynamic QoS management protocols.