Workshop D: Interactive and Distributed Multi-Media Systems on Highspeed Networks

Half-day workshop on Monday, April 10, 1995
2:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Room: 48/051

Interactive and distributed multimedia systems are key technologies rapidly evolving from marketing hype and research prototypes to commercial products.

Despite the great success WWW applications experience within the Internet community, the usefulness of the WWW in its present form seems to be limited to the presentation of static data. This restriction is not acceptable, especially for pretentious commercial applications.

The transmission characteristics of the Internet are not appropriate for high-bandwidth, low-latency audio- and video-based applications, with many users working on the same data.

Other information networks based on high communication rates, as appropriate for real-time requirements, like ATM or B-ISDN, are currently evolving. But still, only few applications exist that make use of these capabilities. Products as successful as the WWW do not -yet- exist in this field.

The aims of the workshop are:

• to identify the requirements for commercially-oriented, bandwidth-intensive applications like video-on-demand, pay-per-view, on-line browsing of extensive data stores, etc.
• to determine to which extend the mechanisms of the WWW are able to fulfill these requirements.
• to identify the relations between WWW-based systems and architectures from other distributed multi-media (but not WWW-based) platforms, like MHEG-based systems.
• to present approaches for solutions that are tailored to highspeed networks.
• to discuss topics like interoperability of highspeed multimedia applications with narrowed bandwidth networks such as Euro-ISDN.

Workshop participants should submit abstracts that directly address the aims of this workshop or fit into one of the following categories:

High speed servers

Authors that present aspects of high speed extensions to WWW servers (e.g. gateways to high speed networks) are especially invited to join the workshop.

WWW based interactive multi-media applications

Reports on WWW-based applications that introduce interactive multi-media presentations fit into this category. Especially commercial applications are welcome. The authors should indicate the general problems encountered and how they are solved.

"Fiber to the home" or "Service-on-Demand trials"

Reports about how the WWW or related approaches such as "service-on-demand", can be used to bring the Internet, via high bandwidth networks such as cable networks, to the home are welcome as well.

Representatives of industrial and research institutes are invited to discuss the above topics. The workshop will be jointly conducted by members of the System-Software Group (Kaiserslautern University, Germany) and the CEC Karlsruhe, a center for applied research of Digital Equipment Corporation.

Schedule of Workshop D

14:00: Welcome, Introduction

Lutz Heuser, CEC Karlsruhe - European Applied Research Center, Digital Equipment, Karlsruhe, Germany;
Peter Rösch, University of Kaiserslautern, AG Systemsoftware, Germany

14:15: Project reports

Helmut Cossman, Carsten Griwodz, IBM European Networking Center, Heidelberg, Germany Michael Baentsch, Peter Rösch, University of Kaiserslautern, AG Systemsoftware, Germany
• Discussion (15 min.)

15:00: Experience report

Oliver Frick, Martin Richartz, University of Karlsruhe, Telecooperation Office, Germany
• Discussion (10 min.)

15:30: Coffee Break

15:45: Experience report

Mirko Labbri, University of Bologna, Italy
• Discussion (10 min.)

16:15

Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser, University of Linz, Austria;
Stefan Gessler, Hans-Werner Gellersen, University of Karlsruhe, Telecooperation Office, Germany
• Discussion (10 min.)

16:45: Project report

Brigitta König-Ries, University of Karlsruhe, IPD, Germany
• Discussion (10 min.)

17:15: Final Wrap-Up

17:30: END