Mobile Agent-Based Services for Real-Time Multimedia Content Delivery

Technologies and applications that enable multi-party, multimedia communications are becoming moreand more pervasive in every facet of daily lives: from distance learning to remote job training, frompeer-to-peer conferencing to distributed virtual meetings. To effectively use the evolving Internet infrastructureas ubiquitously accessible platform for the delivery of multi-faceted multimedia services, notonly are advances in multimedia communications required but also novel software infrastructures areto be designed to cope with network and end-system heterogeneity, improve management and controlof multimedia distributed services, and deliver sustainable QoS levels to end users. In this chapter, theauthors propose a holistic approach based on agent-oriented middleware integrating active services,mobile event-driven agents, and multimedia internetworking technology for the component-based prototyping,dynamic deployment, and management of Internet-based real-time multimedia services. Theproposed approach is enabled by a distributed software infrastructure (named Mobile Agent MultimediaSpace – MAMS) based on event-driven mobile agents and multimedia coordination spaces. In particular,a multimedia coordination space is a component-based architecture consisting of components (players,streamers, transcoders, dumper, forwarders, archivers, GUI adapters, multimedia timers) that providebasic real-time multimedia services. The event-driven mobile agents act as orchestrators of the multimediaspace and are capable of migrating across the network to dynamically create and deploy complex mediaservices. The effectiveness and potential of the proposed approach are described through a case studyinvolving the on-demand deployment and management of an adaptive cooperative playback service.