Maintaining multimedia information quality in distributedenvironments with resource poor computers: using machine independence tosend dynamic methods to adapt with the dynamic media data

摘要

The explosion in the use of Internet technology has heralded a newera in computer-based communication, however this technology is limitedby the inflexibility of this architecture and its fixed connectivity.The last few years have seen a rise in the provision of devices forinter-personal communication. These include Personal Digital Assistants(PDAs), laptops, and networked computers. These devices have manyadvantages, particularly mobility, but tend to be resource poor in termsof bandwidth, memory and software. The challenge is to integrate thisnewly emerging mobile technology with the existing legacy systems inorder to explore their latent power. This means that new methods andtechniques are required to overcome this lack of resources while stilldelivering the highest possible information quality. In this work weshow how machine independence can be used to aid in the maintenance ofinformation quality by augmenting the functionality of the client/serverrelationship, in particular for challenging applications such asmultimedia communication. We have achieved this by extending therelationship to include dynamic (run-time) distributed configuration sothat quality based configuration at the server end can be properlyexploited, and intermediate distributed services, such as informationfiltering used to reduce bandwidth requirements, can be more easilyutilised. This method has shown us much promise in allowing resources tobe used in a distributed manner and overcome the problem of maintaininginformation quality in resource poor end computer system environments