Advanced solutions for quality-oriented multimedia broadcasting

Multimedia content is increasingly being delivered via different types of networks to viewers in a variety of locations and contexts using a variety of devices. The ubiquitous nature of multimedia services comes at a cost, however. The successful delivery of multimedia services will require overcoming numerous technological challenges many of which have a direct effect on the quality of the multimedia experience. For example, due to dynamically changing requirements and networking conditions, the delivery of multimedia content has traditionally adopted a best effort approach. However, this approach has often led to the end-user perceived quality of multimedia-based services being negatively affected. Yet the quality of multimedia content is a vital issue for the continued acceptance and proliferation of these services. Indeed, end-users are becoming increasingly quality-aware in their expectations of multimedia experience and demand an ever-widening spectrum of rich multimedia-based services. As a consequence, there is a continuous and extensive research effort, by both industry and academia, to find solutions for improving the quality of multimedia content delivered to the users; as well, international standards bodies, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), are renewing their effort on the standardization of multimedia technologies. There are very different directions in which research has attempted to find solutions in order to improve the quality of the rich media content delivered over various network types. It is in this context that this special issue on broadcast multimedia quality of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting illustrates some of these avenues and presents some of the most significant research results obtained by various teams of researchers from many countries. This special issue provides an example, albeit inevitably limited, of the richness and breath of the current research on multimedia broadcasting services. The research i- - ssues addressed in this special issue include, among others, factors that influence user perceived quality, encoding-related quality assessment and control, transmission and coverage-based solutions and objective quality measurements

Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

A resource management architecture for future mobile communications systems

This paper presents an overview of a hierarchical Resource Management architecture for future mobile communications systems. The architecture is designed to be generic and can therefore be adopted for a range of Radio Access Methodologies. In particular it provides a mechanism for radio resource management across airinterfaces such as those being defined for use with UMTS. Given the move towards packet-switched technologies both in the Core Network and the Radio Access Network [1], the architecture embraces the concept of statistical QoS applied to individual flows in the form of a commitment level. I

An optimum dynamic priority-based call admission control scheme for universal mobile telecommunications system

The dynamism associated with quality of service (QoS) requirement for traffic emanating from smarter end users devices founded on the internet of things (IoTs) drive, places a huge demand on modern telecommunication infrastructure. Most telecom networks, currently utilize robust call admission control (CAC) policies to ameliorate this challenge. However, the need for smarter CAC has becomes imperative owing to the sensitivity of traffic currently being supported. In this work, we developed a prioritized CAC algorithm for third Generation (3G) wireless cellular network. Based on the dynamic priority CAC (DP-CAC) model, we proposed an optimal dynamic priority CAC (ODP-CAC) scheme for Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). We then carried out simulation under heavy traffic load while also exploiting renegotiation among different call traffic classes. Also, we introduced queuing techniques to enhance the new calls success probability while still maintaining a good handoff failure across the network. Results show that ODP-CAC provides an improved performance with regards to the probability of call drop for new calls, network load utilization and grade of service with average percentage value of 15.7%, 5.4% and 0.35% respectively

Mobihealth: mobile health services based on body area networks

In this chapter we describe the concept of MobiHealth and the approach developed during the MobiHealth project (MobiHealth, 2002). The concept was to bring together the technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs), wireless broadband communications and wearable medical devices to provide mobile healthcare services for patients and health professionals. These technologies enable remote patient care services such as management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies. Because the patient is free to move anywhere whilst wearing the MobiHealth BAN, patient mobility is maximised. The vision is that patients can enjoy enhanced freedom and quality of life through avoidance or reduction of hospital stays. For the health services it means that pressure on overstretched hospital services can be alleviated