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

Robust P2P Live Streaming

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb la Fundació i2CATThe provisioning of robust real-time communication services (voice, video, etc.) or media contents through the Internet in a distributed manner is an important challenge, which will strongly influence in current and future Internet evolution. Aware of this, we are developing a project named Trilogy leaded by the i2CAT Foundation, which has as main pillar the study, development and evaluation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Live streaming architectures for the distribution of high-quality media contents. In this context, this work concretely covers media coding aspects and proposes the use of Multiple Description Coding (MDC) as a flexible solution for providing robust and scalable live streaming over P2P networks. This work describes current state of the art in media coding techniques and P2P streaming architectures, presents the implemented prototype as well as its simulation and validation results

Efficient Support for Application-Specific Video Adaptation

As video applications become more diverse, video must be adapted in different ways to meet the requirements of different applications when there are insufficient resources. In this dissertation, we address two sorts of requirements that cannot be addressed by existing video adaptation technologies: (i) accommodating large variations in resolution and (ii) collecting video effectively in a multi-hop sensor network. In addition, we also address requirements for implementing video adaptation in a sensor network. Accommodating large variation in resolution is required by the existence of display devices with widely disparate screen sizes. Existing resolution adaptation technologies usually aim at adapting video between two resolutions. We examine the limitations of these technologies that prevent them from supporting a large number of resolutions efficiently. We propose several hybrid schemes and study their performance. Among these hybrid schemes, Bonneville, a framework that combines multiple encodings with limited scalability, can make good trade-offs when organizing compressed video to support a wide range of resolutions. Video collection in a sensor network requires adapting video in a multi-hop storeand- forward network and with multiple video sources. This task cannot be supported effectively by existing adaptation technologies, which are designed for real-time streaming applications from a single source over IP-style end-to-end connections. We propose to adapt video in the network instead of at the network edge. We also propose a framework, Steens, to compose adaptation mechanisms on multiple nodes. We design two signaling protocols in Steens to coordinate multiple nodes. Our simulations show that in-network adaptation can use buffer space on intermediate nodes for adaptation and achieve better video quality than conventional network-edge adaptation. Our simulations also show that explicit collaboration among multiple nodes through signaling can improve video quality, waste less bandwidth, and maintain bandwidth-sharing fairness. The implementation of video adaptation in a sensor network requires system support for programmability, retaskability, and high performance. We propose Cascades, a component-based framework, to provide the required support. A prototype implementation of Steens in this framework shows that the performance overhead is less than 5% compared to a hard-coded C implementation

A Study on the Usage of Cross-Layer Power Control and Forward Error Correction for Embedded Video Transmission over Wireless Links

Cross-layering is a design paradigm for overcoming the limitations deriving from the ISO/OSI layering principle, thus improving the performance of communications in specific scenarios, such as wireless multimedia communications. However, most available solutions are based on empirical considerations, and do not provide a theoretical background supporting such approaches. The paper aims at providing an analytical framework for the study of single-hop video delivery over a wireless link, enabling cross-layer interactions for performance optimization using power control and FEC and providing a useful tool to determine the potential gain deriving from the employment of such design paradigm. The analysis is performed using rate-distortion information of an embedded video bitstream jointly with a Lagrangian power minimization approach. Simulation results underline that cross-layering can provide relevant improvement in specific environments and that the proposed approach is able to capitalize on the advantage deriving from its deployment

Securing Media for Adaptive Streaming

This paper describes the ARMS system which enables secure and adaptive rich media streaming to a large-scale, heterogeneous client population. The secure streaming algorithms ensure end-to-end security while the content is adapted and streamed via intermediate, potentially untrusted servers. ARMS streaming is completely standards compliant and to our knowledge is the first such end-to-end MPEG-4-based system