Design of a middleware for QoS-aware distribution transparent content delivery

Developers of distributed multimedia applications face a diversity of multimedia formats, streaming platforms and streaming protocols. Furthermore, support for end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) is a crucial factor for the development of future distributed multimedia systems. This paper discusses the architecture, design and implementation of a Quality of Service (QoS) aware middleware platform for content delivery. The platform supports the development of distributed multimedia applications and can deliver content with QoS guarantees. QoS support is offered by means of an agent infrastructure for QoS negotiation and enforcement. Properties of content are represented using a generic content representation model described using the OMG MOF model. A content delivery framework manages stream paths for content delivery despite differences in streaming protocols and content encoding. The integration of the QoS support, content representation and content delivery framework results in a QoS-aware middleware that enables representation transparent and location transparent delivery of content.