Data to the People -- It's a Matter of Control

This position paper highlights some early results from our current research. We are building prototype multimedia services, e.g., digital television, video on demand, and teleconferencing, for metropolitan area networks. Our work illustrates that application- aware resource management plays a critical role in providing such services economically. The paper describes a middleware system - called Narnia - that supports the development and deployment of these application-aware resource controls. Using Narnia programming abstractions, application developers can create flexible, dynamic resource managers as part of multimedia service implementations. The paper also presents a brief summary of our experiences using Narnia to build applications.