Retrieval scheduling for collaborative multimedia presentations

The single-system approach is no longer sufficient to handle the load on popular Internet servers, especially for those offering extensive multimedia content. Such services have to be replicated to enhance their availability, performance, and reliability. In a highly replicated and available environment, server selection is an important issue. In this paper, we propose an application-layer broker (ALB) for this purpose. ALB employs a content-based, client-centric approach to negotiate with the servers and to identify the best server for the requested objects. ALB aims to maximize client buffer utilization in order to efficiently handle dynamic user interactions such as skip, reverse presentation, go back in time. We also present details of a collaborative multimedia presentation platform that we have developed based on ALB.