Co-operative Multimedia on Heterogeneous Platforms

The development of a distributed and heterogeneous generic multimedia platform presents many issues. The hardware, software and network platforms are heterogeneous, so device-independence and interoperability are vital. Therefore, the primary objective of the research presented here is to introduce, to specify and to evaluate a generic architecture, including communication mechanisms and multimedia features. This architecture provides functionality in the areas of transfer, processing, storage, presentation and interaction. In addition, co-operation and timing control paradigms must be introduced to allow real-time communication and remote access; such features are termed Tele-Media (tele-communicating multimedia).