With the deployment of multimedia service proxies at
different locations in the networks, it is possible
to create an application-level media service proxy
network. Examples of media services offered by this
network include media data adaptation, transformation,
protection, enhancement, recovery... and different
combinations of them. Multimedia sources and clients
will then connect to this network and create
customized, value-added, and composite media service
delivered by one or more proxies in the media service
proxy network.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding
multimedia service path in the media service proxy
network. A service path is a chain of media service
proxies between a media source and a media client.
With dynamic changes in proxy capacity and connection
bandwidth between the proxies, our goal is to find
the `best' path with respect to end-to-end resource
availability for each service path request. Our
solution includes (1) a mechanism to monitor and
propagate resource availability information in the
media service proxy network and (2) an algorithm to
find the best service path based on the resource
monitoring results. Its main features include: (1)
the resource monitoring mechanism provides reasonable
accuracy and stability, while incurring controlled
overhead; (2) the service path finding algorithm
finds the best path for each service path request,
and achieves high overall success rate among all
requests; and (3) it is an application-level
solution, and does not require changes to the
lower-level network infrastructure.
