Calendar description:
Design principles: layering, protocols, interfaces; models for open distributed processing; real-time requirements; request-response and stream processing, real-time scheduling, design for performance and scalability; other quality of service issues; user perspective versus system performance parameters, cost/performance trade-offs, negotiations; adaptive and mobile applications; examples of multimedia applications and protocols.

Course objectives: The students will become familiar with the issues and design principles for distributed and mobile applications that adapt to quality of service requirements of the users and constraints imposed by the underlying communication networks and end-systems. They will also get acquainted with a good  number of protocols and system designs that are used for practical distributed multimedia applications.

In the context of a course project, the student will study a particular topic in more depth by searching the literature and critically reading the pertinent papers which will be synthesized and summarized, or by doing some hands-on programming project related to the topic. The student will write a report on his project and give an oral presentation in class.

Professor: Gregor v. Bochmann , phone: 562-5800 ext.: 6205, e-mail: bochmann@site.uottawa.ca , office: SITE building (room 5082), office hours:  Wednesday 11:30 to 12:15 or by appointment (please send me an e-mail stating when you would like to meet)

Course activities:

• Lectures given by professor
• Presentations given by invited speakers (to be determined)
• Presentations given by students who present the results of their course project.

Prerequisites

• A course on computer networks and communication protocols
• A course on software engineering and some practical experience in programming 
• A certain maturity in relation with computer engineering principles and practice (in particular, knowledge about resource management, CPU scheduling, databases etc.)

Course content  

• Software components and interfaces, compatibility issues 
• Distributed services, communication protocols and layering 
• CORBA, Java RMI
• HTTP, XML and SOAP

Media encoding (2 lectures) 

audio encodings

image and video encodings

End-to-end quality of service requirements for multimedia applications (presentational vs. interactive; point-to-point vs. multicasting)

Network and Transport level protocols (IP, TCP/UDP, RTP)

IP-telephony: H.232 and SIP, SDP

Mobility (device, user, session)

Ubiquitous computing

QoS issues in operating systems  (2 lectures)

Multimedia servers  (1 lectures) 

• Review of networking architectures (optical and IP backbone; local access networks; wireless networks) 
• Transport quality categories and issues, ATM service categories
• The Internet Integrated Service
• The Internet Differentiated Service
• MPLS, optical networking and future outlook
• Soft-state versus hard-state protocols

Global quality of service management (3 lectures)

The different QoS parameters (presentation qualities, cost, delay, reliability, security, quality of information, etc.) 

QoS management at the application level. 

User perspectives and system optimization

Synchronization specification

Synchronization accuracy

Mechanisms for media synchronization

• Distributed systems management principles 
• Different types of directories/databases:
• DNS and distributed directories 
• LDAP 
• CORBA directory, RMI directory. 
• JINI directory
• Directories for Web Services and Grid applications 
• Transaction management

Other adaptation management issues (2 lectures)

Response-time management for server pools

Special techniques (active networks, mobile agents) and future outlook 

The student projects will be on topics related to the above themes, usually related to some particular protocol, system, or proposition found in some research papers (details to be determined).

Reading material

• Much reading material will be provided in the form of course notes and articles from the literature (see Course Notes ). 
• Two books cover many aspects of this course (put in reserve at the library):
  • [Stei 95] R. Steinmetz and K. Nahrstedt, Multimedia Systems,  X.media.publishing, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2004.
  • [Lu 96] G. Lu, Communication and Computing for Distributed Multimedia Systems, Artech House, 1996. (*** ??? available in the bookstore of the University ??? )
• Another book put in reserve at the library
• [Ferg 98] P. Ferguson and G. Huston, Quality of Service - Delivering QoS on the Internet and in Corporate Networks, John Wiley, 1998.
• Other useful Books
• [Bake 97] S. Baker, CORBA Distributed Objects: Using Orbix, Addison-Wesley, 1997.
• [Hege 94] H. G. Hegering and S. Abeck, Integrated Network and System Management, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
• [Coul 94] G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore and T. Kindberg, Distributed Systems - Concepts and Design, Addusib-Wesley, 1994.
• [Blai 98] G. Blair and J. B. Stefani, Open Distributed Processing and Multimedia, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
• [Buford 94] J.F.K. Buford, Multimedia Systems , Addison-Wesley Publ., 1994.

Last updated: September 5,  2005