Abstract. Today, we are surrounded by a constantly growing number of networked multimedia devices. These devices offer high-quality input and output capabilities often together with enough computing power and programmability to perform a variety of multimedia operations. However, integrating and controlling these distributed devices from an application is difficult because of the variety of underlying technologies. In this paper we present a network-integrated multimedia middleware especially designed for this heterogeneous environment. Our architecture allows for a flexible usage of different networking technologies and offers the extensibility to transparently use various existing infrastructures. Distributed devices can be discovered, inspected, and then integrated into a common media processing graph. We demonstrate our approach with a distributed camera control application and a multimedia home entertainment center. 1

With the proliferation of networked devices, today’s multimedia applications operate, as never before, in heterogeneous and dynamic environments. An attractive way to deal with this situation is to make applications self-adaptive (or self-reconfigurable); that is, make them able to observe them-selves and their environment, to detect significant changes and to reconfigure their own behavior in QoS-specific ways. This issue has made the subject of numerous works, especially in the context of multimedia applications. However, several key requirements of adaptivity have not been well addressed such as: the generality to a wide range of applications, the customizability to each application context and the flexibility of reconfiguration mechanisms. We address these aspects in a component-based framework for building self-reconfigurable multimedia applications, named PLASMA. This paper describes the architecture of PLASMA and shows its use through an application use case. Experimental evaluations show that reconfigurations have a low cost, while significantly improving the QoS. 1.

Abstract. Distributed multimedia applications are very sensitive to resource variations. An attractive way for dealing with dynamic resource variations consists in making applications adaptive, and even self-adaptive. The objective is to grant applications the ability to observe themselves and their environment, to detect significant changes and to adjust their behavior accordingly. This issue has been the subject of several works; however the proposed solutions lack flexibility and a high-level support that eases the development of adaptive applications. This paper presents PLASMA, a component-based framework for building multimedia applications. PLASMA relies on a hierarchical composition and reconfiguration model which provides the expected support. The experimental evaluation shows that adaptation can be achieved with a very low overhead, while significantly improving QoS of multimedia applications as well as resource usage on mobile equipments. 1.