A Method for Sharing Distributed Multimedia Data with High Transparency and Portability

随着计算能力的增长和宽带接入互联网的普及，能够通过网络访问视频、音频等多媒体数据的流媒体应用的需求越来越大。由于这些应用程序使用它们自己的数据格式和传输协议来保证服务质量，因此在因特网上广泛可用的应用程序很少。然而，为了在互联网上共享海量的多媒体数据，用户可以使用任何客户端应用程序，本文提出了一种利用提供服务质量功能的文件系统来共享多媒体数据的方法。当多媒体数据的质量需要恶化时，本方法的文件系统根据多媒体数据的格式对数据进行填充，使得多媒体数据的文件大小不会发生变化。有了这一功能，客户端应用程序可以透明地访问服务器上的多媒体数据，保持实时性。为了验证我们的方法的有效性，我们实现了我们的方法，并在实际网络上进行了实验。实验结果表明，即使在窄带网络环境下，该方法也是有效的。

With growth of computing power and proliferation of broadband access to the Internet, demand for streaming applications which can access multimedia data such as video and audio via network has been increasing. Since such applications employ their own data formats and transmission protocols in order to guarantee QoS, there are few applications which are widely available on the Internet. However, to share huge amount of multimedia data on the Internet, it is desirable that a user can use any client applications.In this paper, we have proposed a method of sharing multimedia data using file system which provides QoS function. When a quality of multimedia data needs to be deteriorated, the file system of our method supplements data with padding according to the format of multimedia data so that the file size of multimedia data will not be changed. With this feature, a client application can access multimedia data on a server transparently keeping realtimeness. To confirm the effectiveness of our method, we have implemented our method and conduct an experiment on the actual network. The result of the experiment shows that our method is effective even on narrow band network environment.