Server

The DMS offers two level of services, the low level storage service (LLSS) and the high level storage service (HLSS). The low level storage service is responsible for the storage, retrieval and synchronization of multiple streams of monomedia objects. It deals with the hardware and the low level aspects of the system such as managing the physical storage devices as well as the communication media and protocols. The high level storage service is responsible for the construction of structured multimedia objects out of the monomedia ones already stored by the low level storage server. It also performs an admission policy allowing only requests with real time constraints that can be guaranteed without affecting the already being served requests to be admitted. The high level storage server is designed to be able to manage more than one low level storage server though at the moment it is just managing one. A DMS library is provided to allow application programs an easy way to access the DMS and shield them from the underlying communication protocols. A DMS client is built on top of the library to allow end users a simple access to the server.