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

Video adaptation for mobile digital television

Mobile digital television is one of the new services introduced recently by telecommunications operators in the market. Due to the possibilities of personalization and interaction provided, together with the increasing demand of this type of portable services, it would be expected to be a successful technology in near future. Video contents stored and transmitted over the networks deployed to provide mobile digital television need to be compressed to reduce the resources required. The compression scheme chosen by the great majority of these networks is H.264/AVC. Compressed video bitstreams have to be adapted to heterogeneous networks and a wide range of terminals. To deal with this problem scalable video coding schemes were proposed and standardized providing temporal, spatial and quality scalability using layers within the encoded bitstream. Because existing H.264/AVC contents cannot benefit from scalability tools, efficient techniques for migration of single-layer to scalable contents are desirable for supporting these mobile digital television systems. This paper proposes a technique to convert from single-layer H.264/AVC bitstream to a scalable bitstream with temporal scalability. Applying this approach, a reduction of 60% of coding complexity is achieved while maintaining the coding efficiency

Scalable video/image transmission using rate compatible PUM turbo codes

The robust delivery of video over emerging wireless networks poses many challenges due to the heterogeneity of access networks, the variations in streaming devices, and the expected variations in network conditions caused by interference and coexistence. The proposed approach exploits the joint optimization of a wavelet-based scalable video/image coding framework and a forward error correction method based on PUM turbo codes. The scheme minimizes the reconstructed image/video distortion at the decoder subject to a constraint on the overall transmission bitrate budget. The minimization is achieved by exploiting the rate optimization technique and the statistics of the transmission channel

Minimizing the impact of delay on live SVC-based HTTP adaptive streaming services

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is becoming the de-facto standard for Over-The-Top video streaming services. Video content is temporally split into segments which are offered at multiple qualities to the clients. These clients autonomously select the quality layer matching the current state of the network through a quality selection heuristic. Recently, academia and industry have begun evaluating the feasibility of adopting layered video coding for HAS. Instead of downloading one file for a certain quality level, scalable video streaming requires downloading several interdependent layers to obtain the same quality. This implies that the base layer is always downloaded and is available for playout, even when throughput fluctuates and enhancement layers can not be downloaded in time. This layered video approach can help in providing better service quality assurance for video streaming. However, adopting scalable video coding for HAS also leads to other issues, since requesting multiple files over HTTP leads to an increased impact of the end-to-end delay and thus on the service provided to the client. This is even worse in a Live TV scenario where the drift on the live signal should be minimized, requiring smaller segment and buffer sizes. In this paper, we characterize the impact of delay on several measurement-based heuristics. Furthermore, we propose several ways to overcome the end-to-end delay issues, such as parallel and pipelined downloading of segment layers, to provide a higher quality for the video service

Towards SVC-based adaptive streaming in information centric networks

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming services. In HAS, each video is segmented and stored in different qualities. The client can dynamically select the most appropriate quality level to download, allowing it to adapt to varying network conditions. As the Internet was not designed to deliver such applications, optimal support for multimedia delivery is still missing. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a recently proposed disruptive architecture that could solve this issue, where the focus is given to the content rather than to end-to-end connectivity. Due to the bandwidth unpredictability typical of ICN, standard AVC-based HAS performs quality selection sub-optimally, thus leading to a poor Quality of Experience (QoE). In this article, we propose to overcome this inefficiency by using Scalable Video Coding (SVC) instead. We individuate the main advantages of SVC-based HAS over ICN and outline, both theoretically and via simulation, the research challenges to be addressed to optimize the delivered QoE