Providing Cost-Effective Multimedia Services in a Concurrent Engineering Environment

Abstract

Handling of multimedia information in a concurrent engineering environment requires that it be delivm·ed in a cost effective manner, yet having high consumc~r satisfaction. Since most such products run on general purpose computers connected by off the shelf networks, multimedia streams are likely to encounter frame losses, delays and mis-synchronizations, resulting in poor quality. This paper presents metrics to measure such qualitative degradations and reports the results of a user study to validate them. Furthermore, this paper includes the results of a performance analysis of the Continuous Media Toolkit (GMT) for constructing multimedia demonstrations, to measure its ability to satisfy parameters obtained in the user survey. In addition, we describe some enhancements that are being made to CMT to ensure user needs are met.