Distributed Multimedia Applications of Emerging Personal Communication Systems

Like LAN interconnect multimedia will grow from humble begining into a robust, wide-area industry. With advent and the forthcoming of high speed networks, we anticipate distributed multimedia applications will become a common place on the desktops[1]. These applications that could be executed locally or remotely, and could access and retrieve data such as text, graphics, digital audio and video over the network. Some users want their multimedia networks to serve in much same way as today’s phone networks, with direct communication between two or more people or between a caller and a computer system. This communication model is based on real-time interactive access. It will extend across three general types of information flow: between people and documents, as in hyper media; between people and platforms, as in the graphical user intercace; and between people, as in collaborative undertakings like training and conferencing[2]. The ultimedia technological multimedia-vision has been around for years: individuals carrying small , inexpensive handheld communicators and being reaached by voice or data with a single phone number no matter where they are. No more seperate numbers for office, home, facsimile, etc. No more being out of touch on public transport, away from office or home. The multimedia information over the personal communication systems (PCS) is an idealistic environment. In this paper we discuss some of the design aspects of distributed multimedia applications over personal communication system and introduce new complex demands and concepts to personal multimedia communications. The organization of the paper is as follows. Section 2 describes personal communication systems. Section 3 discuss the distributed multimedia systems and examines the nature of the multimedia services and characteristics. Section 4 illustrates some of the models of distributed multimedia system over PCs. Section 5 lists some of the existing multimedia applications. And finally, we conclude with Section 6.