Protocol for collaborative multimedia presentations

Many multimedia presentation applications involve the retrieval of objects from more than one collaborating server. For instance, we can consider distributed video servers where blocks of movies are distributed over a set of servers. Blocks of a movie from different video servers have to be retrieved and presented continuously without any gaps in the presentation. Such applications first need an estimate of the available network resources to each of the collaborating servers in order to identify a schedule for retrieving the objects composing the presentation. A collaborating server can suggest modifications to the retrieval schedule depending on its load. These modifications can potentially affect the retrieval schedule for other collaborating applications. In this paper, we propose an application sub-layer protocol, the Resource Lock Commit Protocol (RLCP), for handling the negotiation and commitment of the resources required for a collaborative multimedia presentation application.