1. Exercises for Chapter 15: Distributed Multimedia Systems
From Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design
Edition 3, © Addison-Wesley 2001

2. Exercise 15.1
Outline a system to support a distributed music rehearsal facility. Suggest suitable QoS requirements and a hardware and software configuration that might be used.
page 610, 616
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

3. Exercise 15.2
The Internet does not currently offer any resource reservation or quality of service management facilities. How do the existing Internet-based audio and video streaming applications achieve acceptable quality? What limitations do the solutions they adopt place on multimedia applications?
page 610, 619, 625
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

4. Exercise 15.3
Explain the distinctions between the three forms of synchronization (synchronous distributed state, media synchronization and external synchronization) that may be required in distributed multimedia applications. Suggest mechanisms by which each of them could be achieved, for example in a videoconferencing application.
page 611
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

5. Exercise 15.4
Outline the design of a QoS manager to enable desktop computers connected by an ATM network to support several concurrent multimedia applications. Define an API for your QoS manager, giving the main operations with their parameters and results.
page
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

6. Exercise 15.5
In order to specify the resource requirements software components that process multimedia data, we need estimates of their processing loads. How can this information be obtained without undue effort?
page
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

7. Exercise 15.6
How does the Tiger system cope with a large number of clients all requesting the same movie at random times?
page
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

8. Exercise 15.7
The Tiger schedule is potentially a large data structure that changes frequently, but each cub needs an up-to-date representation of the portions it is currently handling. Suggest a mechanism for the distribution of the schedule to the cubs.
page
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000

9. Exercise 15.8
When Tiger is operating with a failed disk or cub, secondary data blocks are used in place of missing primaries. Secondary blocks are n times smaller than primaries (where n is the decluster factor), how does the system accommodate this variability in block size?
page 630
Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn © Addison-Wesley Publishers 2000