An overlay network providing application-aware multimedia services

Real-time streaming of multimedia content is increasingly becoming a crucial part of networked applications. A logical consequence of this evolution is a growing demand for services that can be applied on these multimedia streams. In this paper, we present our overlay network which provides such multimedia services. Although these services are application-aware and can thus exploit application-specific knowledge, the overlay network itself is completely generic. Consequently, multiple applications can take advantage of the overlay network, even concurrently. Furthermore, the overlay network is highly extensible, meaning additional services can be added to it easily. Besides describing the architecture of the software component of our overlay network, we also discuss the implementation of two example multimedia services. The first service mixes multiple audio streams into a single stream to enable lightweight voice communication in a Networked Virtual Environment. The second service applies face detection on a video stream to generate meaningful avatars in a meeting system called iConnect. The experimental results produced by these two services clearly demonstrate that our overlay network is capable of providing valuable services for a wide range of networked multimedia applications.