Dynamically reconfiguring multimedia components: a model-based approach

Distributed multimedia systems are potentially subject to frequent and ongoing evolution of application structures. In such systems it is often unacceptable for reconfigurations to fail or to only partially succeed. This paper describes the reconfiguration architecture of the DJINN multimedia programming framework. We introduce the concept of multimedia transactions for structuring changes into atomic units that preserve application consistency and extend these with the smoothness condition to maintain temporal as well as data integrity across reconfigurations. We present a technique for scheduling configuration changes that trades off the perceived level of smoothness against the available resources and the desired timeliness of the reconfiguration.