Bridging the Gap between Multimedia Applications and Heterogeneous Networks using a Marketbased Midd

1
Bridging the Gap between Multimedia Applications
and Heterogeneous Networks using a Market-based
Middleware
Johan Kristiansson, Jeremiah Scholl, and Peter
Parnes
Introduction
Overview of the middleware
Distributed multimedia applications provide users
with a variety of inherently dynamic media, each
having bandwidth requirements that can rapidly
change.
How can bandwidth be shared efficiently between
the different media inside a multimedia
application in order to provide the user with the
optimal aggregate experience?
Solving this problem requires a large amount of
interdisciplinary knowledge such as how to
manage an increasingly complex network
infrastructure, as well as how to deal with
usability issues in an application.
The Bandwidth Broker Agent connects all the
buyers and sellers on the virtual market. The
Bandwidth Consumer Agent is responsible for
purchasing bandwidth on behalf of a media. The
Network Agent obtains the actual supply of
bandwidth that will be sold by the broker.
Market-based bandwidth management
The idea Use microeconomic theory in a virtual
market inside an application in order to make it
easy to combine various network services while
maintaining the efficient use of resources.
Calculate the supply
Bandwidth is traded by consumers and suppliers.
Consumers try to optimize their gain by
purchasing bandwidth that give them the maximum
gain at the lowest price, and suppliers (brokers)
try to sell bandwidth at the highest price in
order to maximize their own profit.
Most often the supply will be equal to the
bottleneck bandwidth to the other end-point, but
for non-flat-rate connections it may also be
bounded by budget controls. Information about
supply can be obtained from a congestion control
scheme, or an independent method.
Calculate the demand
Demand is calculated by creating a utility
function for each media that maps the gain with
different bandwidth levels.
Utility function u(x)
Utility
Price function p(x)
CS
Equilibrium is reached when demand for bandwidth
at the going price equals the supply for
bandwidth at that price. A tâtonnement process
is used to adjust the price iteratively until an
equilibrium price is obtained.
x
Bandwidth
CS
The Bandwidth Consumer Agent calculates the
consumer surplus (CS) in order to calculate the
amount of bandwidth to purchase.
Acknowledgement
Contact information
Luleå University of Technology, 971 87 Luleå,
Sweden Department of Computer Science
Electrical Engineering The Media Technology
Research Group Email Johan.Kristiansson,
Jeremiah Scholl, Peter.Parnes_at_ltu.se
This work was done within the VITAL project,
which is supported by the Objective 1 Norra
Norrland - EU structural fund programme for Norra
Norrland. Support was also provided by the Centre
for Distance-spanningTechnology (CDT).