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

Improved multimedia server I/O subsystems

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Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

Multicriteria decision making for enhanced perception-based multimedia communication

This paper proposes an approach that integrates technical concerns with user perceptual considerations for intelligent decision making in the construction of tailor-made multimedia communication protocols. Thus, the proposed approach, based on multicriteria decision making (MDM), incorporates not only classical networking considerations, but, indeed, user preferences as well. Furthermore, in keeping with the task-dependent nature consistently identified in multimedia scenarios, the suggested communication protocols also take into account the type of multimedia application that they are transporting. Lastly, this approach also opens the possibility for such protocols to dynamically adapt based on a changing operating environment and user’s preferences

Multicriteria decision making for enhanced perception-based multimedia communication

This paper proposes an approach that integrates technical concerns with user perceptual considerations for intelligent decision making in the construction of tailor-made multimedia communication protocols. Thus, the proposed approach, based on multicriteria decision making (MDM), incorporates not only classical networking considerations, but, indeed, user preferences as well. Furthermore, in keeping with the task-dependent nature consistently identified in multimedia scenarios, the suggested communication protocols also take into account the type of multimedia application that they are transporting. Lastly, this approach also opens the possibility for such protocols to dynamically adapt based on a changing operating environment and user's preferences

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

Network convergence and QoS for future multimedia services in the VISION project

The emerging use of real-time 3D-based multimedia applications imposes strict quality of service (QoS) requirements on both access and core networks. These requirements and their impact to provide end-to-end 3D videoconferencing services have been studied within the Spanish-funded VISION project, where different scenarios were implemented showing an agile stereoscopic video call that might be offered to the general public in the near future. In view of the requirements, we designed an integrated access and core converged network architecture which provides the requested QoS to end-to-end IP sessions. Novel functional blocks are proposed to control core optical networks, the functionality of the standard ones is redefined, and the signaling improved to better meet the requirements of future multimedia services. An experimental test-bed to assess the feasibility of the solution was also deployed. In such test-bed, set-up and release of end-to-end sessions meeting specific QoS requirements are shown and the impact of QoS degradation in terms of the user perceived quality degradation is quantified. In addition, scalability results show that the proposed signaling architecture is able to cope with large number of requests introducing almost negligible delay

Optimized resource distribution for interactive TV applications

This paper proposes a novel resource optimization scheme for cloud-based interactive television applications that are increasingly believed to be the future of television broadcasting and media consumption, in general. The varying distribution of groups of users and the need for on-the-fly media processing inherent to this type of application necessitates a mechanism to efficiently allocate the resources at both a content and network level. A heuristic solution is proposed in order to (a) generate end-to-end delay bound multicast trees for individual groups of users and (b) co-locate multiple multicast trees, such that a minimum group quality metric can be satisfied. The performance of the proposed heuristic solution is evaluated in terms of the serving probability (i.e., the resource utilization efficiency) and execution time of the resource allocation decision making process. It is shown that improvements in the serving probability of up to 50%, in comparison with existing resource allocation schemes, and several orders of magnitude reduction of the execution time, in comparison to the linear programming approach to solving the optimization problem, can be achieved

Triptych: multi-objective optimisation of service deployment costs, application delay and bandwidth usage

Advanced Internet services increasingly rely on many components to implement their functionality. These composite services have three important features: they are expensive to deploy, components need to be placed intelligently close to the users to improve quality of experience and they will potentially consume significant amounts of bandwidth. This paper presents Triptych, a multi-objective optimisation framework that tries to optimise according these three dimensions to help the three main stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem: users, application providers and network providers. Triptych implements evolutionary computation approaches for this complex problem, which simultaneously optimise service deployment costs, latency-based user utility and network congestion. These algorithms provide possible operating points, bringing important tools for network managements and resource allocation. A large set of simulations under different scenarios are provided to validate the algorithms.This work has been supported by the US Army Research Laboratory and the UK Ministry of Defence (agreement number W911NF-16-3-0001) and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 761699 (5G-MEDIA).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Network streaming and compression for mixed reality tele-immersion

Bulterman, D.C.A. [Promotor]Cesar, P.S. [Copromotor