QoS-aware middleware support for collaborative multimedia streaming and caching service

Abstract Reducing initial delay of playing time, delay jitter during playing time, and network bandwidth utilization is important for IP-based multimedia streaming services. In heterogeneous computing environments, diversity of computing power and network connection of different devices makes a stable quality of streaming service more difficult. In order to achieve these goals, our quality of service (QoS)-aware middleware for collaborative multimedia streaming and caching service exploits the proximity of a set of peer clients and temporal and spatial locality of cached media streams on these clients. Peer clients collaborate together to deliver streams to heterogeneous client(s) with QoS guarantees. Our paper shows collaborative techniques for multimedia streaming, scheduling and pre-fetching embedded in the QoS middleware architecture for dynamic group management of heterogeneous computing devices. In addition, we provide an underlying QoS-provisioning mechanism to support not only heterogeneous clients, but also dynamic configuration change of them.