2004 Reports

Autonomic Control for Quality Collaborative Video Viewing

Phung, Dan; Valetto, Giuseppe; Kaiser, Gail E.

We present an autonomic controller for quality collaborative video viewing, which allows groups of geographically dispersed users with different network and computer resources to view a video in synchrony while optimizing the video quality experienced. The autonomic controller is used within a tool for enhancing distance learning with synchronous group review of online multimedia material. The autonomic controller monitors video state at the clients' end, and adapts the quality of the video according to the resources of each client in (soft) real time. Experimental results show that the autonomic controller successfully synchronizes video for small groups of distributed clients and, at the same time, enhances the video quality experienced by users, in conditions of fluctuating bandwidth and variable frame rate.