High-Speed Cable Replacement for Multimedia Streaming in Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks

The multimedia content is migrating promptly from standard quality to high-definition and even 3D. As a result, existing wireless technologies can no longer support multimedia streaming as their wired counterparts. To overcome this problem, new wireless technologies that support multi Gbps wireless transmission are desperately needed. In this chapter, we focus on the promising 60 GHz technology and investigate two important standards including ECMA-387 and IEEE 802.11ad standards. Key designs of the two standards are discussed and qualitatively evaluated. Based on our evaluation, one can select the solution that suits best for the targeted applications.

The Challenges of Compressing and Streaming Real Time Video Originating from Mobile Devices

In recent years, mobile phones have become the de facto system of communication across the planet. Mobile phones have helped increase economic growth and critical response in many parts of the world. Mobile phones are even being used for data transmission. However, little academic research has been done on the specific problem of streaming real time video originating from the cameras of mobile devices over cell phone networks. There are many factors that complicate this problem including the limited computational resources of mobile phones, the low and variable bandwidth of cell phone networks, and the need for video compression and streaming algorithms that can be supported by both the mobile phones and cell phone networks. This chapter examines the problems involved and discusses on-going research on the topic. The main goal of this chapter is to identify the real time constraints and challenges of compressing and streaming video from mobile devices for the purpose of designing efficient video compression and streaming techniques that are able to work within the constraints of the limited computational resources and bandwidth available to mobile devices.

Routing and Coding Enhancements to Improve QoS of Video Transmissions in Future Ad Hoc Networks

Video services are much demanded nowadays but bandwidth and delay requirements of this kind of services are very restrictive. Offering real-time video services in wireless ad-hoc networks is not an easy task because of the difficulty of guaranteeing certain quality in a shared medium. Practical solutions should try to improve communications at (and gathering information from) several layers of the protocol stack. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are infrastructure-less wireless networks characterized by being very versatile, dynamic and self-organized but also by the difficulty to achieve a good Quality of Service in video transmissions due to packet losses and node mobility. On the other hand, the Wireless Mesh Network is presented as the next step in wireless networks. Wireless Mesh Networks have a hierarchical topology, clustered structure and static backbone, which all help to improve the network stability. In the way towards Wireless Mesh Networks, hierarchical routing protocols could transform an ad-hoc network in a more robust wireless network. Therefore, in this chapter, hierarchical routing protocols have been studied, particularly Hierarchical Optimized Link State Routing Protocol, and compared with a traditional flat routing protocol named Optimized Link State Routing. Furthermore, additional video coding techniques have been used in order to improve video quality in reception. At application layer, results show that Multi-description Coding achieves better quality on video transmissions when nodes have medium or high mobility, especially when using multipoint-to-point transmission or disjoint paths in a hierarchical structure. Video trace simulations have allowed us to perform subjective quality tests to assert the Quality of Experience improvements in video transmissions.

High-Performance Solutions for Adaptive and Customizable Streaming of Interactive Content to Mobile Devices

Recent improvements in technology have opened new, intriguing, and challenging scenarios for the latest generation of mobile devices, and users are asking for an ever larger spectrum of applications. In particular, implementation of interactive applications is an exciting task. In spite of the continuous improvements in the hardware components of mobile devices, several applications are still based on the remote visualization paradigm that adopts streaming based solutions. Nevertheless, some interactive applications introduce hard constraints to be met when low-delay systems have to be designed. Moreover, these systems have to cope with unstable network bandwidth and limited device capabilities. This Chapter first reviews classic strategies to design and implement remote visualization architectures and then presents recent developments regarding high-performance solutions for streaming interactive and customizable contents to mobile devices. In particular, the newest techniques that are specifically able to efficiently cope with bandwidth fluctuations are discussed, and a comparison between optimization based and control based approaches is addressed.

Reviewing HTTP and RTSP Work in Two Actual Commercial Media Delivery Platforms for Multimedia Services and Mobile Devices

The media streaming server technology have been developed in the recent past using free software and open source approaches. But commercial approaches are preferred by certain multimedia big enterprises. These enterprises dominate the mobile media delivery business. For this reason we think it is interesting to discover the main characteristics of the principal commercial platforms to deliver mobile video streaming to mobile devices and its main key features: Media and delivery components. We will give our vision on: Real Networks’ Helix Media delivery components based on RTSP and Microsoft’s IIS Media Services based on HTTP. The aim of this book chapter is to provide detailed insight into these different streaming approaches and how these platforms and protocols aid in building flexible streaming applications for mobile devices. A comparison among these approaches is also provided and also we present the delivery of video streaming to Apple mobile devices in the two commercial approaches.

Codec Adaptation for Wireless Multimedia Streaming

Due to the time-varying nature of wireless channels and the Internet backbone traffic, it is a challenging task to maintain the quality of wireless multimedia streaming throughout the transmission. An effective solution is to adapt the codec setting based on the wireless channel condition or the Internet backbone state. In this chapter, we present three cross-layer codec adaptation algorithms that adjust the codec setting in real-time based on media access control frame error rate, received signal strength indication, and path bandwidth respectively. Results show that the algorithms are effective in achieving good video quality for wireless multimedia streaming over wireless links.

Resilient P2P Video Streaming over an Urban VANET

This Chapter proposes the concept of resilient multi-source streaming using a peer-to-peer overlay network over an urban vehicular ad-hoc network. Peer-to-peer overlay networks with multiple sources have proven to be robust, distributed solutions to multimedia transport, including streaming. To achieve video streaming over a vehicular ad-hoc network overlay, the Chapter introduces spatial partitioning of a video stream based on flexible macroblock ordering. Flexible macroblock ordering is an error resilient feature of an H.264 video codec in which macroblocks can be assigned to slices in non-raster scan order. Furthermore, the Chapter examines the impact of differing traffic densities and road layouts upon a peer-to-peer overlay network’s performance when streaming video. The research demonstrates that the vehicles’ mobility pattern and their drivers’ behaviors need to be carefully modeled to determine signal reception. The Chapter also considers the impact of the wireless channel, which also should be more realistically modeled, compared to the usual two-ray path loss model.

Context-Aware Multimedia Services for Mobile Lecture Streaming

Applications and infrastructures of the future will have to be intelligent to some extent, which means that they should automatically adapt to the current situation and intention of the user. This regards basic interoperability issues in heterogeneous environments as well as advanced behavior of software. Two technological trends contribute to solve this problem: service-orientation and context-awareness. We present a system architecture and realization that makes use of these trends. Its scope is education in general, or the interconnection of face-to-face and online learning in particular. The focus of this article is to explain the technical architecture behind these applications. Its validity is demonstrated with the help of selected use cases.

Using MapReduce Framework for Mobile Applications

Most of today’s smart-phones are geared towards a single user experience, whether it is reading a book, watching a movie, playing a game or listening to music. However, there has been a shift towards providing a more complex and social experience: applications are being developed and deployed to help users connect and share information with each other.These applications allow people to keep track of their friends’ statuses in real time, or to help them navigate around traffic congestion. While exciting, most such applications are currently being developed in an ad-hoc nature, reinventing and duplicating a lot of work to support their distributed operations. In this work, we present our framework, Misco. A platform for developing distributed applications for mobile smart-phones. We also explore some existing solutions, applications and related systems. We then discuss some of the many future research paths and show that solutions like ours are just the beginning.

Multimedia Services Offer Mixing Telco and Internet Assets

Traditionally, Internet has offered multimedia services independently of the services offered by companies associated to Telco (companies that traditionally offer telephony and associated services). In the last years, the technical community has assumed that the convergence of both worlds is a fact; however, there are many barriers to be removed. On one hand the emergence of cloud computing technologies will change the way of providing multimedia services. On the other hand economic issues are very important in this convergence process. In this chapter we describe how multimedia services are offered from Internet and the Telco. The convergence of Web 2.0 and Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem on the WIMS 2.0 initiative focuses on creating value for Internet and Telco and making multimedia services a reality for end users, independent of the underlying environment. We propose a novel strategy that uses cloud computing to facilitate the development and deployment of converged multimedia services. We also observe a sustainable business model accompanying the converged proposals to offer innovative multimedia services.