Multimedia applications demand specific support from database management systems due to the characteristics of multimedia data and their interactive usage. This includes integrated support for high-volume and time-dependent (continuous) data types like audio and video. One critical issue is to provide handling of continuous data streams including buffer management as needed for multimedia presentations. Buffer management strategies for continuous data have to consider specific requirements like providing for continuity of presentations, for immediate continuation of presentations after frequent user interactions by appropriate buffer resource consumption. Existing buffer management strategies do not sufficiently support the handling of continuous data streams in highly interactive multimedia presentations. In this paper we present the "least/most relevant for presentation" (L/MRP) buffer management strategy which considers presentation specific information in order to provide an optimized behavior with respect to the requirements mentioned above. L/MRP is a framework to formulate specific interaction models and is therefore adaptable to individual multimedia applications. We present a simulation study showing that an instantiated L/MRP outperforms existing approaches for given types of interactive multimedia applications. It is shown that L/MRP is especially suitable to support highly interactive multimedia presentations.

Top