Managing Bandwidth in Multimedia Applications Using a Market-Based Middleware

摘要

This paper presents an application-layer middleware that applies a microeconomic model to help multimedia applications utilize available bandwidth in a way that maximizes the user's net benefit. The key components are a bandwidth broker that puts the supply of available bandwidth on a virtual market residing inside the application, and utility functions for each media, which are used to calculate their relative gain to the user at each bandwidth level. Basic supply and demand principles are used where the broker raises a virtual price if the total demand from all media exceeds the available supply, or lowers the price if demand is lower than the available supply. The advantage of the middleware is that it allows problems related to network management (usually affecting the supply) and human computer interaction (usually affecting demand) to be researched and integrated separately into an application and combined to leverage bandwidth in the best possible way. As a proof of concept, a prototype has been built by integrating the middleware into Marratech Pro, a commercially available e-meeting application. The paper presents experimental results using this prototype.