Towards a Peer-to-peer Architecture for the provision of Adaptable Multimedia Composed Documents

This article proposes an architecture that delivers adapted multimedia documents to participants of a P2P system. Both the multimedia documents and the adaptation resources are made available in the P2P system. The adaptation architecture looks for adaptation resources, composes them in order to support complex adaptation operations and to perform the adaptations. The system also faces the difficulty that, in a P2P environment, a peer is likely to disconnect. It thus takes into account the dynamic changes in both users and adaptors environments. A complete adaptation chain is implemented using the web services technology, the MPEG-21 multimedia standard and the SMIL multimedia language. A first evaluation of the approach is presented; it shows that there is no significant overhead with respect to other adaptation architectures. This is encouraging given that the approach enables parallel execution of adaptation functions and load balancing which could lead to gains in performance.