Quality Planning for Distributed Collaborative Multimedia Applications

The tremendous power and low price of today's computer systems have created the opportunity for exciting applications rich with graphics, audio and video. Despite this potential, planning computer systems to support the intensity of these multimedia applications is an extremely di cult task. We have developed a exible model and method that allows us to predict multimedia application performance from the user's perspective. Our model takes into account the components fundamental to multimedia application quality: latency, jitter and data loss. In applying our method to three speci c applications, we have identi ed some general traits: 1) processors are the bottleneck in performance for many multimedia applications; 2) networks with more bandwidth often do not increase the quality of multimedia applications; and 3) performance for many multimedia applications can be improved greatly by shifting capacity demand from computer system components that are heavily loaded to those that are more lightly loaded.