Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Dynamic multimedia content access in a ubiquitous and distributed computing environment

Ubiquitous computing is the concept of embedding many heterogeneous devices within our everyday environment in such a way that they operate seamlessly and become transparent to the person using them. It covers a wide range of applications and services, but of particular interest is multimedia resource adaptation which involves customization and dynamic adaptation of resources according to usage environments and user preferences; this aims to provide consumers with transparent access. This thesis proposes a content negotiation architecture for dynamic adaptation of multimedia content according to usage environment attributes. The architecture shields users from complex configuration details related to the adaptation of multimedia content, while guiding them through user related choices. The architecture also dynamically updates the multimedia content during transmission and consumption when related usage environment attributes are changed. The content negotiation mechanism in the proposed architecture is then extended and deployed in a mobile computing environment to accommodate transfer of multimedia content application session state between devices in a seamless manner. An application session transfer architecture which allows sessions to be directed, stored and transferred through an intermediary session server is proposed. The thesis also considers the foregoing work on the adaptation of multimedia resources applied to sharing in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. It proposes a super peer based dynamic resource adaptation architecture which employs \u27pull\u27 and \u27push\u27 two-stage adaptation approach. This guides users through resource search and configuration details without exposing them to unnecessary technical details; the result is that requested content is transparently adapted to heterogeneous terminal devices. Two separate, but related, modifications are proposed to further improve the performance of the proposed P2P architecture. Firstly, peers are clustered according to registered geographic location information and secondly, based on that registered location information, a locality-based service is introduced which allows users to search services according to their geographic locations. The latter encourages service providers to increase the uptime of their devices and hence provide spare computing power for active adaptation of resources for low-end peers. Resource replication is an important aspect of a P2P system and an adaptive resource replication strategy based on the proposed P2P architecture is presented. It uses resource request rate as the metric to trigger the resource replication process, and proportionally replicates multimedia resources into various configuration states according to the properties of peers and the size of peer clusters. Also, the strategy uses peer related information stored on super peers to determine which peers should be selected to perform adaptive replications and where the resulting replicas should be stored. The proposed adaptive replication strategy demonstrates that the network delays are reduced while resource hit rate is increased in comparison to other replication strategies. Investigation of the deployment of a BitTorrent (BT) - like approach in the proposed P2P resource adaptation architecture is also considered in this thesis. In addition, the architecture\u27s peer selection strategy is adopted and evaluated as a way to enhance the peer selection process in BT. The strategy uses super peers as trackers to intelligently select peers according to their capabilities and shared resource segments and overcome the scalability issue of existing BT implementation. The proposed selection strategy reduces average access time and increases download speed when compared with the existing BT peer selection process with randomly selected peers. Also, the deployment of BT in the proposed P2P architecture shows that it greatly reduces the congested download problem which was previously reported

Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation