Hartmut Wittig

The personal electronic program guide—towards the pre-selection of individual TV programs

Digital and interactive TV systems will bring hundreds of TV program channels to the people. Then, the use of existing strategies for channel selection will fail: It is neither possible to select the program by “sur@g” through the channels, nor by using printed program guides. This paper describes a new approach towards creation of a Personal Electronic Program Guide (EPG) regarding the individual view preferences of a usez The foundation of individual TV program pre-selection is a classified and categorized TV program description and the maintenance of user profiles describing his viewing preferences. Besides creation of user projiles, an automatic update technique will be introduced. Channel selection events are taken as parameters for an adjustment of user projiles. Personal program pre-selection is done by using intelligent

Issues ofReserving Resources in Advance

ltering techniques which apply individual user profiles to the TV program description (so-called matching). An approach to design and realize an EPG proto~pe system will be described in this papex

HeiRAT—quality-of-service management for distributed multimedia systems

Resource management offers Quality-of-Service reliability for time-critical continuous-media applications. Currently existing resource management systems provide only means to reserve resources starting with the reservation attempt and lasting for an unspecified duration. However, for several applications such as video conferencing the ability to reserve the required resources in advance is needed. This paper explains a model for resource reservation in advance. We identify and discuss issues which must be resolved in resource reservation in advance systems. Some of the possible scenarios to be considered are described and we show how the resource reservation in advance scheme can be embedded in a general architecture.

Network Layer Scaling: Congestion Control in Multimedia Communication with Heterogeneous Networks and Receivers

Abstract. Multimedia systems must be able to support a certain quality of service (QoS) to satisfy the stringent real-time performance requirements of their applications. HeiRAT, the Heidelberg Resource Administration Technique, is a comprehensive QoS management system that was designed and implemented in connection with a distributed multimedia platform for networked PCs and workstations. HeiRAT includes techniques for QoS negotiation, QoS calculation, resource reservation, and resource scheduling for local and network resources.

GLASS: A Distributed MHEG-Based Multimedia System

Because of the admission control schemes in computer networks, in many multimedia communication scenarios it is not possible to get guaranteed quality of service for data transmission along the entire route from sender to receiver. In such cases scaling mechanisms can be used to overcome problems caused by resource congestion. Whenever resource bottlenecks are noticed, the multimedia traffic through these resources will be reduced for a limited time. The scaling scheme described in this paper uses mechanisms in the network layer to enable short delay times between detection of overload and the reduction of multimedia traffic. Network layer scaling allows priority-controlled regulation of multimedia traffic over network resources and adaptive handling of various paths and receivers. The monitoring and scaling strategies in the network layer and a prioritization scheme for multimedia stream packets are described.

CPU Utilization of Multimedia Processes: HeiPOET - The Heidelberg Predictor of Execution Times Measurement Tool

This paper is about GLASS, a distributed multimedia system that is currently under development. The multimedia department of the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg, Germany, participates in the project along with other industrial and university partners. GLASS is an acronym for Globally Accessible Services, expressing the systems wide range of possible applications. Interactive TV scenarios can be presented as well as multimedia applications for interactive learning and games for entertainment. Clients for standard telecommunications services like FAX and E-mail can be included as well as presentation components providing access to hypertext-oriented internet services like WWW. The systems components can be highly distributed using networks with TCP/IP. An application is driven by MHEG-encoded presentations that allow for the definition of sophisticated presentations. The system comprises multiple server and client components. All components can be operated on a mix of different platforms. Although running on different operating systems, all clients have the same look and feel which is defined completely by the MHEG presentation.

INTEROPERABLE ITV SYSTEMS BASED ON MHEG

Due to the time characteristics of audio and video data, the processing of multimedia applications has to be done using real-time mechanisms. Scheduling algorithms used within such systems require information about the processing time requirements, the CPU utilization of the applications, to perform schedulability tests. Since multimedia applications are often constructed by combining processing modules (often called stream handlers), processing time determination for these modules is required. The multitude of these modules and the large variety of computer systems calls for a measurement tool. In this paper we define the term CPU utilization for multimedia processing and describe the CPU utilization measurement tool HeiPOET. The presented measurements show that the tool provides measurement results with good accuracy.

Decision Support System

Todays interactive television systems are using proprietary communication protocols and interchange formats. To provide inter-operability at the application level the next generation of interactive television system will be based on standardized communication protocols, monomedia and multimedia formats. This paper presents the Globally Accessible Services (GLASS) system which is a prototype interactive television system based on the Multimedia and Hypermedia Expert Group (MHEG) standard. After a brief introduction to MHEG as the multimedia interchange format between application server and set-top box in interactive television systems, the GLASS clients and servers are described, and an example scenario for navigation in the GLASS system is provided.

Matching and Clustering

The model presented in Section 7 is predicated on the assumption that the longer a program is viewed, the more likely that this is or will become a viewer’s favourite. It has been found out that there are exceptions to this assumption. This section analyses these exceptions and shows how they can be handled by the intelligent media agent. Extensions to the matching and clustering functions are proposed.10

QoSFinder: Ein Verfahren zur Wegewahl für multimediale Ströme in Rechnernetzen

Having described the structure and meaning of program descriptors and user profiles, matching and clustering algorithms applied to the program descriptors and user profiles are explained in this section.7