Ensuring high availability of distributed multimedia applications

Multimedia applications are characterized by QoS (quality of service) requirements, which depend an the quality of video and audio transmitted to the client, and the respect of time constraints associated with video and audio data. Much work has been done in order to provide system support that meets these requirements. However, existing proposals do not include the consequences of failure occurrence on QoS. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a resource reservation model that integrates availability requirements. Our design goals for this model were: (i) to allow programmers to reserve resources with respect to various QoS requirements including availability; and (ii) to preserve the transparency of mechanisms used for availability. This paper details the resulting model, together with its integration in a distributed system