Decision optimization techniques for efficient delivery of multimedia streams

With the amount of available multimedia data increasing world-wide and with the expanding need for rapid access to this data, efficient data delivery has become a significant problem for which no fully satisfactory solutions have been provided, yet. A major issue is the concurrent usage of the same bottleneck network resources by multiple communication flows. In the case of multimedia streams, which consist of large volumes of data being transferred over usually long periods of time, and which require strict quality of service guarantees, this problem is even more acute. In this paper we present several decision support and optimization techniques for one of the most common types of solutions employed nowadays - advance resource reservations.