The proposed research is directed towards the advancement of the exploration of complex multi-dimensional timing control for multimedia streams in distributed multimedia systems. To achieve this goal, this research effort focuses on the exploration and development of a true generic system for the advanced timing control of resources used by multimedia streams. Timing control is particularly important for interactive multimedia distributed applications such as telerobotics, teleoperation in manufacturing, and virtual reality applications with force feedback including telesurgical training and audio-video conferencing. The focus of this research is on the study of algorithms and techniques to provide distributed control of multi-dimensional timing behaviors over different resources in an integrated fashion. While there have been advances in the control of the one dimensional case (timely delivery), and of the two- dimensional case (media synchronization), there has been little improvement in providing a third dimension in which the systems can control the adaptation of timely delivery and/or media synchronization specified by quality of service (QoS) parameters such as end-to-end delay and jitter. This research addresses integrated time-variant QoS management for the above defined three dimensions. To achieve this integration, the research effort calls for: development of concepts for time-variant QoS management; development of a theoretical framework for formal specifications for time-variant QoS and the modeling of distributed control to accommodate QoS requirements; provision of an experimental testbed for multimedia transmission according to QoS requirements; and, evaluation of the framework through an experimental verification. ***
