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The spread of distributed multimedia applications is setting forth a new set of challenges in the management of host and network resources for guaranteeing QUALITY AND SERVICE (QoS). When the multimedia applications compete for resources, as in the case of a cooperative multimedia environment, the management task becomes even more difficult.We have developed a cooperative multimedia environment (CME) that manages multimedia services and the underlying resources in an integrated way. Each user is provided with a single interface to invite other users to a cooperative session, select the media services to be used in the session, and specify his QoS requirements for the media services throughout the session. In this work, we describe the architectural details of the CME and its components with particular emphasis on the QoS mapping and QoS control mechanism. We also present the design and implementation details of an experimental prototype that provides video, audio and white board services.

This work tries to bring hypermedia out of our multiple research-oriented cooperative hypermedia systems into the kinds of systems people in the real world can use. Meeting support for distributed teams is one of these and process support is another. The practical challenges include how to develop a (whiteboard-like) structure-rich visual hypermedia space that is accessible from the Web, how to integrate Microsoft office applications into the system for managing documents in a (visual hypermedia represented) meeting process, and how to set up A/V and application sharing connections easily for all the meeting participants. The system described in this paper has been used in three use cases and initial feedback indicates that it has successfully addressed several such practical challenges.