MIT Master's Thesis, May 1996
This report describes the design and implementation of a mobile system for distributed multimedia applications. Most current multimedia systems rely on the computing power of desktop workstations and high bandwidth local area networks, which confine the use of multimedia applications to fixed locations in limited environments. By constructing a distributed mobile multimedia system, a new area of multimedia applications can be studied and developed.
The mobile system hardware is a PC laptop computer integrated with portable multimedia and wireless networking equipment. The VuSystem, a real time interactive multimedia programming system, is used for live media processing and programming. I developed a video capture device driver and media source/sink modules for the VuSystem to access the multimedia hardware. Performance results demonstrate that the mobile system has sufficient capability to process live media information, but reveal bottlenecks in the video capturing and wireless networking hardware. Given the system's scalable architecture, performance will improve as new technologies become available.
