IDMS'97 - European Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems
and Telecommunication Services
September - 1997
With the evolving availability of wireless communication services and of affordable mobile devices such as notebooks or Personal Digital Assistants, mobile computing is becoming widely accepted and applied. It is one further step towards the vision of information access for anyone, anytime, anywhere. Now, mobile multimedia applications are needed to make the vision more real. However, because of the narrow bandwidth of wireless wide-area networks and the limited resources of mobile devices in comparison to stationary systems, the handling of multimedia data faces severe problems. This leads to a need for effective solutions that enable the interactive handling with multimedia services even over a wireless link.
In this paper we present an approach to optimize the rendering process in terms of response time in a mobile environment that is composed of a mobile client and several stationary servers. We propose an architecture that adapts the rendering tasks to the available resource environment. The main idea is to use the knowledge about the application semantic data, the resource environment, and the user preferences to find a good trade-off between the limitations.
As a first experiment for the adaptation platform, we present a WWW rendering application using VRML 2.0 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which filters VRML scenes in order to render only parts selected by the user. It illustrates the handling of application semantic data that can be used to adapt the rendering process.
Zipped Postcript (11 pages, 92 KB).