Distributed Multimedia Application Study

The development of distributed multimedia technology has the potential to both create new application areas and augment those that pre-existed. To benefit from this potential, however, it is important to ensure that application developers are provided with system services which help them achieve their objectives. Developers of distributed systems, therefore, must fully understand the nature of these objectives and the system functionality required to support them. It is essential that an understanding is achieved of the types of application which will be developed and the mechanisms necessary for these applications to operate successfully. This paper surveys multimedia applications research in order to assess its contribution to providing requirements for future processing and communications support infrastructures. The paper also derives a set of requirements for future distributed systems technology.