Access to real-time video and more complicated multimedia data (e.g., immersive 3D environments) at any time from any location promises to be a next step in the ongoing impact of the Internet in arenas such as education, electronic commerce, and entertainment. Toward that goal, the SWORD Project is using a combination of system modeling and system prototyping to design scalable on-demand digital data delivery methods for popular, widely shared multimedia files.

This talk will describe the unique SWORD prototype design as well as two of our recent streaming protocol innovations that illustrate the interplay between modeling system design trade-offs and developing new inventions that have significantly superior performance. In particular, many emerging applications require scalable methods for streaming media content, on-demand, to large numbers of clients via satellite, the Internet, or some other lossy network. Previous scalable streaming protocols require a high data rate to each client, and/or do not allow clients to recover from packet loss, or require long delays before the clients can play the video or audio content they've requested. The two new SWORD multicast protocols assume modest client data rates, allow each client to recover lost packets without jitter as long as their cumulative loss rate is within a tunable threshold, and have short client play latency. The new Reliable Periodic Broadcast (RPB) and Reliable Bandwidth Skimming(RBS) protocols are simple to implement and achieve nearly the best possible scalability for a given set of client characteristics. Finally, on-going research of the SWORD project will also be summarized..

Tuesday, October 9 @ 4pm in Duncan Hall 1064
A reception will precede the talk at 3:30 p.m. in DH 3092

About Mary Vernon

Mary K. Vernon received a B.S. degree with Departmental Honors in chemistry and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1983 she joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering. Her research interests include performance analysis techniques for evaluating computer/communication system design tradeoffs, parallel/distributed architectures and software systems, scalable information infrastructure, and streaming media servers.

Prof. Vernon received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the ACM Fellow award in 1996, and a University of Wisconsin Vilas Associate Award in 2000. She has served as Chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS and is currently a co-PI/Executive Committee member of the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA). She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, and IFIP WG 7.3 on Information Processing System Modeling, Measurement and Evaluation.