Distributed Multimedia Through Broadband Communications

Here's a book that offers a pragmatic view of the multimedia field -- enabling you to sort out the real, commercially viable applications from all the hype surrounding multimedia. It is the first book to focus on the networked aspects and requirements of multimedia -- multimedia experts take you from today's desktop to tomorrow's client-server applications and remotely distributed systems. It is specifically written to address the business opportunities and challenges that may exist for today's corporate manager.

This volume presents the proceedings of the International COST 237 Workshop, held in Vienna in November 1994 in the framework of the CEC COST 237 Multimedia Telecommunications Services Projects. The 24 papers presented in revised version were selected from 46 submissions; they are organized in sections on teleservices, multimedia mail, archiving and retrieving; teleservice support; quality of service and synchronization; multipeer communication; broadband network transport issues; and variable bit rate video coding transport.

Multimedia service provisioning is believed to be one of the prerequisites to guarantee the success of next-generation wireless networks. Examining the role of multimedia in state-of-the-art wireless systems and networks, Broadband Mobile Multimedia: Techniques and Applications presents a collection of introductory concepts, fundamental tech

Broadband communications is widely recognized as one of the key technologies for building the next generation global network infrastructure to support ever-increasing multimedia applications. This book contains a collection of timely leading-edge research papers that address some of the important issues of providing such a broadband network infrastructure. Broadband Communications represents the selected proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Broadband Communications, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Hong Kong in November 1999. The book is organized according to the eighteen technical sessions of the conference. The topics covered include internet services, traffic modeling, internet traffic control, performance evaluation, billing, pricing, admission policy, mobile network protocols, TCP/IP performance, mobile network performance, bandwidth allocation, switching systems, traffic flow control, routing, congestion and admission control, multicast protocols, network management, and quality of service. It will serve as an essential reference for computer scientists and practitioners.

Here is the network specialist's complete guide to planning and deploying multimedia on the Internet, Intranets, and any networked environment. The title covers everything LAN and WAN professionals need to know to prepare for--and deploy--networked multimedia.

Look to this authoritative, new resource for a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field of microfluidics. The book shows you how to take advantage of the performance benefits of microfluidics and serves as your instant reference for state-of-the-art technology and applications in this cutting-edge area. It offers you practical guidance in choosing the best fabrication and enabling technology for a specific microfluidic application, and shows you how to design a microfluidic device. This forward-looking resource identifies and discusses the broad range of microfluidic applications including, fluid control devices, gas and fluid measurement devices, medical testing equipment, and implantable drug pumps. You get simple calculations, ready-to-use data tables, and rules of thumb that help you make design decisions and determine device characteristic

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices. Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.

Here is a thorough, not-overly-complex introduction to the three technical foundations for multimedia applications across the Internet: communications (principles, technologies and networking); compressive encoding of digital media; and Internet protocol and services. All the contributing systems elements are explained through descriptive text and numerous illustrative figures; the result is a book well-suited toward non-specialists, preferably with technical background, who need well-composed tutorial introductions to the three foundation areas. The text discusses the latest advances in digital audio and video encoding, optical and wireless communications technologies, high-speed access networks, and IP-based media streaming, all crucial enablers of the multimedia Internet.