Service composition for advanced multimedia applications
Liang Jin, Klara Nahrstedt · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
By composing distributed, autonomous services dynamically to provide new functionalities, service composition provides an attractive way for customized multimedia content production and delivery. Previous research work has addressed various aspects of service composition such as composibility, QoS-awareness, and load balancing. However, most of the work has focused on applications where data flow from a single source is processed by intermediate services and then delivered to a single destination. In this paper, we address the service composition problem for advanced multimedia applications where data flows from multiple content sources are processed and aggregated into a composite flow, which is then delivered to one or more destinations, possibly after being customized for each receiver. We formally define the problem and prove its NP hardness. We also design a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Our algorithm has the following attractive features: (1) it is effective at finding low cost composition solutions; (2) it has the ability to trade off computation overhead for better results; (3) it is efficient and can scale to relatively large number of network nodes and component services.