Design of a middleware for QoS-aware distribution transparent content delivery

Developers of distributed multimedia applications face a diversity of multimedia formats, streaming platforms and streaming protocols. Furthermore, support for end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) is a crucial factor for the development of future distributed multimedia systems. This paper discusses the architecture, design and implementation of a QoS-aware middleware platform for content delivery. The platform supports the development of distributed multimedia applications and can deliver content with QoS guarantees. QoS support is offered by means of an agent infrastructure for QoS negotiation and enforcement. Properties of content are represented using a generic content representation model described using the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) model. A content delivery framework manages stream paths for content delivery despite differences in streaming protocols and content encoding. The integration of the QoS support, content representation and content delivery framework results in a QoS-aware middleware that enables representation transparent and location transparent delivery of content

Semi-automatic semantic enrichment of raw sensor data

One of the more recent sources of large volumes of generated data is sensor devices, where dedicated sensing equipment is used to monitor events and happenings in a wide range of domains, including monitoring human biometrics. In recent trials to examine the effects that key moments in movies have on the human body, we fitted fitted with a number of biometric sensor devices and monitored them as they watched a range of dierent movies in groups. The purpose of these experiments was to examine the correlation between humans' highlights in movies as observed from biometric sensors, and highlights in the same movies as identified by our automatic movie analysis techniques. However,the problem with this type of experiment is that both the analysis of the video stream and the sensor data readings are not directly usable in their raw form because of the sheer volume of low-level data values generated both from the sensors and from the movie analysis. This work describes the semi-automated enrichment of both video analysis and sensor data and the mechanism used to query the data in both centralised environments, and in a peer-to-peer architecture when the number of sensor devices grows to large numbers. We present and validate a scalable means of semi-automating the semantic enrichment of sensor data, thereby providing a means of large-scale sensor management

A QoS monitoring system in a heterogeneous multi-domain DVB-H platform

The MobileTV, IPTV, and DVB standards (DVB-H/T) have been defined to offer mobile users interactive multimedia services with quality of service (QoS) consistency analogous to TV services. However, the market has yet to provide effective and economical solutions for the real-time delivery of such services to the corresponding transmitters over multi-domain IP networks. The monitoring system proposed in this paper enables the QoS in the IP networks involved in the delivery of real-time multimedia content to the transmitters to be ascertained. The system utilizes the QoS parameters defined in MPEG-2 Transport Streams to detect problems occurring in the heterogeneous multi-domain IP networks. The ability to detect problems having an adverse effect on QoS allows appropriate control actions to be determined to recover the QoS across the composite IP network. The design and implementation of the proposed QoS-Monitoring system (QoS-MS) is presented, followed by analysis of experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of the system

The development of a rich multimedia training environment for crisis management: using emotional affect to enhance learning

PANDORA is an EU FP7-funded project developing a novel training and learning environment for Gold Commanders, individuals who carry executive responsibility for the services and facilities identified as strategically critical e.g. Police, Fire, in crisis management strategic planning situations. A key part of the work for this project is considering the emotional and behavioural state of the trainees, and the creation of more realistic, and thereby stressful, representations of multimedia information to impact on the decision-making of those trainees. Existing training models are predominantly paper-based, table-top exercises, which require an exercise of imagination on the part of the trainees to consider not only the various aspects of a crisis situation but also the impacts of interventions, and remediating actions in the event of the failure of an intervention. However, existing computing models and tools are focused on supporting tactical and operational activities in crisis management, not strategic. Therefore, the PANDORA system will provide a rich multimedia information environment, to provide trainees with the detailed information they require to develop strategic plans to deal with a crisis scenario, and will then provide information on the impacts of the implementation of those plans and provide the opportunity for the trainees to revise and remediate those plans. Since this activity is invariably multi-agency, the training environment must support group-based strategic planning activities and trainees will occupy specific roles within the crisis scenario. The system will also provide a range of non-playing characters (NPC) representing domain experts, high-level controllers (e.g. politicians, ministers), low-level controllers (tactical and operational commanders), and missing trainee roles, to ensure a fully populated scenario can be realised in each instantiation. Within the environment, the emotional and behavioural state of the trainees will be monitored, and interventions, in the form of environmental information controls and mechanisms impacting on the stress levels and decisionmaking capabilities of the trainees, will be used to personalise the training environment. This approach enables a richer and more realistic representation of the crisis scenario to be enacted, leading to better strategic plans and providing trainees with structured feedback on their performance under stress

Query management in a sensor environment

Traditional sensor network deployments consisted of fixed infrastructures and were relatively small in size. More and more, we see the deployment of ad-hoc sensor networks with heterogeneous devices on a larger scale, posing new challenges for device management and query processing. In this paper, we present our design and prototype implementation of XSense, an architecture supporting metadata and query services for an underlying large scale dynamic P2P sensor network. We cluster sensor devices into manageable groupings to optimise the query process and automatically locate appropriate clusters based on keyword abstraction from queries. We present experimental analysis to show the benefits of our approach and demonstrate improved query performance and scalability

The QoSxLabel: a quality of service cross layer label

A quality of service cross layer label

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework