The SICMA Teleteaching Trial on ADSL and Intranet networks

Abstract

The provision of interactive multimedia services, such as video-on-demand, teleshoping and distance learning, to a large number of users, still remains a challenging issue in the multimedia area. Despite of recent technological advances in all levels of the distributed multimedia infrastructure (storage, network, compression, standardization etc..), there is a strong need for feedback from public trials. Trial descriptions and evaluations, by revealing potential system limitations and measuring end user reactions, will provide valuable input towards the large-scale deployment of such services. In this paper, we present the teleteaching trial that was held at the end of 1998, at Limburg University (Belgium), in the context of ACTS SICMA project. We describe in detail the overall architecture and present results/implementation experiences for the parts of the system, putting the main emphasis on the server. We present technical integration issues between DAVIC and Internet server protocols (RTSP, DSM-CC etc..), and discuss the overall trial results.

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This work was supported by the EU project SICMA, AC071 in the framework of the program “ACTS — Advanced Communication Technologies and Services”