Multimedia presentations (e.g., lectures, digital libraries) normally include discrete media objects such as text and images along with continuous media objects such as video and audio. Objects composing a multimedia presentation need to be delivered based on the temporal relationships specified by the author(s). Hence, even discrete media objects (that do not normally have any real-time characteristics) have temporal constraints on their presentations. Composition of multimedia presentations may be
light (without any accompanying video or large multimedia data) or
heavy (accompanied by video for the entire presentation duration). The varying nature of the composition of multimedia presentations provides some flexibility for scheduling their retrieval. In this paper, we present a
min-max skip round disk scheduling strategy that can admit multimedia presentations in a flexible manner depending on their composition. We also outline strategies for storage of multimedia presentations on an array of disks as well as on multi-zone recording disks.
Emilda Sindhu received the B.Tech degree in Electrical & Electronics from University of Calicut, India, in 1995 and the M.S. degree in Computer Science in 2003 from National University of Singapore. This paper comprises part of her master thesis work. She is presently employed as Senior Research Officer at the A-star Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Singapore. Her current research interests include distributed computing particulary Grid computing. She is involved in the development of tools and components for distributed computing applications.Lillykutty Jacob obtained her B.Sc (Engg.) degree in electronics and communication from the Kerala University, India, in 1983, M.Tech. degree in electrical engineering (communication) from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in 1985, and PhD degree in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, in 1993. She was with the department of computer science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, S. Korea, during 1996–
97, for post doctoral research, and with the department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, during 1998–2003, as a visiting faculty. Since 1985 she has been with the National Institute of Technology at Calicut, India, where she is currently a professor. Her research interests include wireless networks, QoS issues, and performance analysis.
Ovidiu Daescu received the B.S. in computer science and automation from the Technical Military Academy, Bucharest, Romania, in 1991, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Notre Dame, in 1997 and 2000. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests are in algorithm design, computational geometry and geometric optimization.
B. Prabhakaran is currently with the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. B. Prabhakaran has been working in the area of multimedia systems: multimedia databases, authoring & presentation, resource management, and scalable web-based multimedia presentation servers. He has published several research papers in prestigious conferences and journals in this area.
Dr. Prabhakaran received the NSF CAREER Award FY 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases. Dr. Prabhakaran has served as an Associate Chair of the ACM Multimedia
2003 (November 2003, California), ACM MM 2000 (November 2000, Los Angeles), and ACM Multimedia
99 conference (Florida, November 1999). He has served as guest-editor (special issue on Multimedia Authoring and Presentation) for ACM Multimedia Systems journal. He is also serving on the editorial board of Multimedia Tools and Applications journal, Kluwer Academic Publishers. He has also served as program committee member on several multimedia conferences and workshops. Dr. Prabhakaran has presented tutorials in several conferences on topics such as network resource management, adaptive multimedia presentations, and scalable multimedia servers.
B. Prabhakaran has served as a visiting research faculty with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park. He also served as a faculty in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore as well as in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.