Towards an Internet-wide Distributed System for Media Stream Processing and Delivery

Speaker: Richard West

12th February 2004 , 1pm , Room 519 Claremont Tower

Abstract

This talk focuses on the construction of an Internet-wide distributed system for media stream processing and delivery. Applications targeted by this system include live webcasts, tele-medicine and interactive distance learning. The aim is to support numerous channels of real-time data streams, generated by a number of publishing nodes and delivered to hundreds of thousands of clients with specific QoS constraints. The novelty of our approach concerns the use of overlay topologies (now popular with peer-to-peer systems) to deliver QoS-constrained streams between publishers and potentially thousands of subscribers. Consequently, I will discuss preliminary results from the study of k-ary n-cubes for data delivery, given that membership of the system, publishers, subscribers and QoS constraints may change at run-time. Additionally, I will describe work we are doing on the construction of an efficient end-host architecture, as part of this Internet-wide system. This includes a user-level sandboxing mechanism, to predictably, efficiently and safely execute stream processing agents (SPAs), as data is transported along its path from source to destination. Techniques that support the safe execution of application-specific service extensions, while avoiding unnecessary data copying and heavyweight context-switching will be discussed.