Delivering interactive multimedia documents over networks

Abstract

A family of applications that consists of interactive multimedia documents, such as electronic magazines and interactive TV shows, is examined and the links between application architecture, user behavior, and network performance are investigated. The kinds of application-specific information that influence the end-to-end quality of service are discussed. The architecture and dynamics of the interactive document in terms of presentation objects (P-Objects), which are the segments of information accessed by the application and which are described according to their size, media composition, and access links, are described. The same structural characteristics that may make an interactive multimedia document appealing to the end user are the characteristics that are helpful during dynamic network performance optimization. This observation is based on the hypothesis that the P-Objects' access graph, together with viewing time statistics, is the information most useful to the network delivery control mechanism for optimizing network performance. Preliminary guidelines for both network and application designers to address each other's concerns are presented.