Java Distributed Computing

Bandwidth Management

Armed with a basic ability to monitor our data throughput over time, we can now discuss how to use this information to effectively manage the available bandwidth.

The general principle behind bandwidth management is to optimize the use of the available bandwidth to satisfy certain requirements of the system. The nature of these requirements varies greatly from one application to the next, and so do the approaches used to manage bandwidth. The general approach is to assess the performance of the system in terms of data input and output rates, content conversion rates, and computation times. Based on this assessment, we can try to adjust resource allocations to improve the overall performance of the system.

In order to demonstrate some of the ways that bandwidth can be managed, we’ll first look at how a streaming audio agent would be implemented. In many ways, streaming audio is a worst-case scenario for bandwidth-limited applications, since there are heavy real-time constraints as well as computation requirements. After this, we will look at implementing a component of a Java-based WWW browser, to see how bandwidth can be managed across multiple input streams to maximize perceived performance.

Streaming Multimedia

In this case, the primary purpose of the local agent is to receive multimedia data from the network, process it as needed to convert it to a format suitable for presentation, and present the multimedia data to the user. The driving factor is optimizing ...