Streaming of Continuous Media for Distance Education Systems

Distance education created new challenges regarding the delivery of large size isochronous continuous streaming media (SM) objects. In this paper, we consider the design of a framework for customized SM presentations, where each presentation consists of a number of SM objects that should be retrieved and displayed to the user in a coherent fashion. We describe a retrieval optimizer (Prime) that captures the flexibilities and requirements imposed by the user query, user profile, and session profile. Then, it determines how this query script should be imposed against the continuous media (CM) server to reduce contention. We also provide a cost model to evaluate each proposed plan. Finally, we explain the role of memory buffering in alleviating the server bandwidth fragmentation problem. Our preliminary experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed model and techniques in generating near optimal retrieval.