Quality-adaptice methods dor elastic real time applications

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The broad goal of this work is to develop new systems and networking techniques to support time-sensitive distributed applications, using a best-effort commodity infrastructure. The research objectives of this work are related by a general theme of quality adaptation, the motivation of which is to address the conflict between time-sensitive applications and the best effort service model that still remains the sole option available to the vast majority of Internet users. We also aim to explore how to apply principles of context-aware computing to enhance the process of user and community oriented video production and distribution.The general idea of quality adaptation is to structure systems so that they can dynamically adapt the quality of their results, in such a way as to attain the basic timing requirements of the application, using the resources that happen to be available (network bandwidth, processor cycles, storage space, display area, etc.). This approach is motivated to address two fundamental obstactles to predictable timing: device diversity and dynamic sharing of resources. In the long term, the work proposed here aims toward a vision of "ubiquitious media access", wherein commodity devices---which can be expected to be abundant, vastly diverse, multimedia-capable, and network capable---are able to act as endpoints for the streaming of continuous media, effectively and in a co-ordinated fashion, thereby forming the basis for a broad range of new distributed applications.