An Empirical Study of Client Interactions with a Continuous-Media Courseware Server

While considerable research has gone into investigating various networking and operating system mechanisms for supporting the transfer and playout of stored continuous media (e.g., audio and video), very little information is available about how users actually use such systems. Understanding how users interact with such a system — i.e., developing a user workload characterization — is crucial in designing and evaluating efficient continuous media (CM) resource allocation and access mechanisms. We have designed and built an interactive WWW-based, multimedia, client/server application, known as MANIC (Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware), that streams synchronized CM (currently audio) and HTML documents to remote users. MANIC was used by more than 200 users during the Spring 1997 semester to listen to, and view, the stored audio lectures and lecture notes for a full-semester senior-level course at the University of Massachusetts. In this paper we pr…