This paper presents the design and implementation architecture of a replication mechanism for a distributed multimedia system medianode which is currently developed as an infrastructure to share multimedia-enhanced teaching materials among lecture groups. The proposed replication mechanism supports the quality of service (QoS) characteristics of multimedia data and the availability of system resources. Each type of data handled and replicated are classified according to their QoS characteristics and replication requirements. The main contribution of this paper is the identification of new replication requirements in distributed multimedia systems and a multicast-based update propagation mechanism by which not only the update events are signalled, but also the updated data are exchanged between replication managers. By prototyping the proposed replication mechanism in medianode, we prove the feasibility of our concept for combining the QoS concept with replication mechanisms.
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