The INSTANCE II project is a research project at the DMMS group at the University of Oslo. The project started in 2002 and is funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.
INSTANCE II focuses on the design and development of new solutions for a next generation multimedia distribution infrastructure that minimizes response times, resource requirements, and costs, and that is well suited for large scale systems, in terms of regional coverage and amounts of data. The goal is to investigate a complete solution for such a distribution infrastructure, e.g., a CDN. To achieve this we study three orthogonal aspects of the distribution system and the interaction between these. The three areas of interest are operating system kernel enhancements, networking issues and caching solutions. The two latter form a middleware level between the operating system and the application.
The project takes the increasing popularity of multimedia services on the Internet into account, by addressing the problems of mixed media data. Mixed media data consist of a large number of different data types, which naturally place different demands on the distribution infrastructure. The two main types are streaming data (video) and discrete data (text and images). One type of application that exhibits these characteristics is News on Demand (NoD).
 | Dr. Thomas Plageman (+47-22852743, plageman@ifi.uio.no, home page) |
 | Dr. Vera Goebel (+47-22852402, goebel@ifi.uio.no, home page) |
 | Zeljko Vrba (zvrba@ifi.uio.no, home page) |
Zeljko focuses on OS kernel enhancements. He started in 2005. Based on the ideas and results from the INSTANCE (Intermediate Storage Node Concept) project and the Medianode project, he will further enhance performance by optimizing the kernel for mixed media data flow.
 | Trude Hafsøe (+47-22852532, truhafso@ifi.uio.no, home page) |
Trude investigates the networking aspects of INSTANCE II, and focuses on building and maintaining an overlay network that takes the QoS needs of the applications into account. This is done by integrating ideas from topology aware networks with QoS routing and a mechanism for automatic network reconfiguration. Her research interests include network protocols, QoS awareness, Internet measurements and characteristics, databases and data modeling.
 | Frank T. Johnsen (+47-22852407, frankjo@ifi.uio.no, home page) |
Frank focuses on caching solutions suitable for use in proxy servers in a CDN. His goal is to find a caching scheme which performs well (e.g., lowers access latency for users) for mixed media NoD. To achieve this, he looks into various existing caching algorithms and seeks to create a new scheme by combining ideas from both centralized and cooperative caching schemes. His research interests include web and multimedia caching, content distribution and peer to peer systems.
