Magda M. Mourad

Multimedia digital conferencing: a web-enabled multimedia teleconferencing system

The convergence of the telecommunication and information technologies brings a real revolution to the communications world and hence in the way that people interact and communicate with each other. With the development of the World Wide Web technology for browsing and navigating through the Internet, complemented by the global telecommunication network, new, easy-to-use tools are being developed to simplify and enhance collaboration among people. In this paper, we describe the MultiMedia Digital Conferencing (MMDC) prototype system, which is a Web-enabled teleconferencing system. The MMDC server allows heterogeneous clients to use the Internet and the telecommunication network in order to establish and participate in data and/or audio conferences through the use of a variety of audio systems and computing platforms.

Some issues in the implementation of multimedia communication systems

Multimedia communications are presented as a major application of broadband digital networks. It is shown that building multimedia communication systems (MMCSs) requires much more than the presence of a high-bandwidth network. In order to study how broadband communication systems will deal with multimedia documents, the structure and characteristics of these documents must be first examined in detail. An overview of the different techniques used to represent multimedia information is given. The design requirements and features of MMCSs and the various issues involved in their implementation are discussed in the light of a research prototype as well as of other experiences reported in the literature. Standardization will play an important role in making MMCSs usable. Efforts in this area are discussed, as well as some other practical problems that need to be solved before multimedia communication becomes the major user of high bandwidth networks.<<ETX>>

Multimedia communication: some experiments and observations

In this paper, we present the architecture and components of two experimental multimedia communication systems built by integrating available hardware devices and developing software modules. These platforms are used to investigate various issues related to the development of distributed multimedia applications. The problems encountered during the implementation of these systems, as well as the lessons learned, are discussed. Some experimental performance measurements and major identified bottlenecks are given for each architecture.

A web-based multimedia collaboration system

Contrary to the increasingly popularity of one-on-one interactions between subscribers of on-line services and the services they access, business transactions usually involve some sort of multi-party collaboration and interaction. Hence, for business oriented on-line services, multimedia versions of office environments and meeting-rooms need to be developed on desktop computers. These business environment recreations would allow people to collaborate remotely in virtual office surroundings existing only on their desktops and to meet and conduct business with their colleagues, peers, and business associates on-line.

Video-on-demand: experience with protocols and their implementation

This paper summarizes some observations made during our research project aiming at investigating the practical problems encountered during the implementation of interactive multimedia information systems. The prototype deals with digitally compressed information encoded in MPEG-2 formats. We have opted for the use of a set of standard protocols. In this paper we give a brief description and critique of these standard protocols and discuss some aspects related to their implementation. We have specifically focused here on the MPEG-2 Digital Storage Media Command and Control (DSM-CC) protocol.