Open media service architecture for advanced collaboration environments

Abstract

Advanced collaboration environments are extensively utilized for distance learning, e-science, and other distributed global collaboration events. In such environments, high-quality and seamless media services play an important role in improving the quality of user experience to participants. In this paper, to support high-quality media-based services, we design open media service architecture for advanced collaboration environments, by combining the open interface for state-of-the-art media tools, the performance monitoring tools for devices and networks, and application-level adaptation schemes for media streaming. By implementing the proposed architecture on top of an open-source Access Grid (AG) collaboration toolkit, we verify that high-quality collaboration among several collaboration sites can be effectively realized over a multicast-enabled network testbed with improved media quality experience.