A QoS-Aware Architecture for Multimedia Content

In this paper, we propose a mobile agent infrastructure to support "Quality of Service" (QoS) parameters in multimedia content streaming. The infrastructure is able to face the issues concerning multimedia content transformation, in order to ensure that the client-side QoS is met. A Grid computing platform is exploited and content adaptation is performed through appropriate agents that are allocated as jobs and executed on Grid hosts. A location service is therefore devised and made available within the Grid system, which helps finding the hosts whose geographic position and network connections minimise the delays required to move the desired multimedia content from the storage to the processing site, and (after suitable transcoding) from this to the requesting client