Content Adaptation for Heterogeneous Mobile Devices

Recent advances in mobile computing have spawned a very heterogeneous environment of mobile devices, which is reflected by the presence of the devices’ different capabilities. This chapter focuses on handling this device heterogeneity in the context of content adaptation of mobile services so that generic content can be provided to any device in the heterogeneity spectrum. We present an approach that enables mobile services to adapt its content provision to a mobile device by considering the device’s content provision capabilities. Those capabilities encompass both the communication channels for content delivery and the capabilities to present content to the user. Our approach is designed as a service platform that implements a content adaptation procedure for Web-based mobile services by utilizing device capability databases and generic page transformation. This approach enables mobile devices to visualize any generic content device specifically on their integrated browsers.

Movement Prediction Oriented Adaptive Location Management

Movement prediction oriented adaptive location management provides a major role in personal communication service (PCS) system. Generally the GSM system supports two level architecture. Because it supports two kinds of databases-Home Location register and Visitor Location Register. Every time when the user crosses the location area it has to register with the HLR. This creates high cost for registration and location tracking as it involves the use of costly bandwidth between the Mobile Switching Center (MSC) and the HLR. In this paper the technique for reducing the costs during the location tracking and location update is proposed. Taking the movement prediction of the users it creates the block and the user registers with the HLR only after crossing the block instead of crossing the single cell. This movement prediction is generated using one neural network model for all the users. The block register (BR) is introduced between the block and the HLR in two level systems, thus introduces three level architecture. In this architecture some signaling cost values between the MSC-BR, BR-HLR and BR-BR are maintained to get the better performance. In this proposed system the aim is to set the value between the MSC and BR and the two BR as small as possible and the value between the BR and the HLR must be higher to get the better performance.

Traitor Tracing in Mobile Multimedia Communication

Digital fingerprinting is reported and used in copy tracing. It embeds different information, for example, Customer ID, into multimedia content, produces a different copy, and sends the copy to the corresponding customer. If a copy is spread to unauthorized customers, the unique information in the copy can be detected and used to trace the illegal distributors. In this chapter, we introduce some digital fingerprinting algorithms, review the existing traitor tracing schemes, analyze the performances of some typical algorithms through comparison, and propose the future trends and some open issues in this field. It is expected to provide some valuable information to researchers or engineers working in mobile multimedia security.

Context Modelling Approaches for Mobile Systems

The actual mobile technology and the increasing need to obtain rich multimedia content about each and every aspect of the human life are changing the approach of the users to the World Wide Web. Indeed, the pervasive use of mobile devices and the heterogeneity of the provided services and information make the accessibility and usability of the Web resources a hard assignment. In particular two main tasks have been identified as focal issues, the first one regards the choose of a suitable model to express the complex activities of the Web (context modeling approaches), and the second one regards the translation of the different schemas, representing these Web activities, in a more suitable, manageable and standardizing schema. In this chapter we will present the problems related to the modeling of context data, and we will describe the actual and future approaches of Context Modeling according to the mobile devices world.

Streaming Multimedia via Peer-to-Peer Systems

The concept of multimedia streaming gives the end-users the ability to playback various multimedia contents while they are still being downloaded from the provider. This provides a major advantage in which users do not need to wait for the whole media clips to be downloaded; it also reduces the time of delivery and allows their bandwidth to be efficiently used for other purposes. In this chapter, we review the advantages, limitations and challenges faced by current peer-to-peer approaches in multimedia streaming, taking a close look at the architectures, protocols, service quality, and case studies. Our analysis reveals that, when placed in the context of mobile systems, peer-to-peer streaming is still at its infancy. We illustrate shortcomings and provide an outlook for mobile peer-to-peer streaming, highlighting the most pressing research issues. The reader will appreciate the current state-of-the-art of this remarkable technology and ways in which it may become a reality.

Research Challenges in Multimedia WiMAX

On the stage of today’s communications world, broadband mobile technologies are a continuously flourishing trend. In this context, WiMAX, a technology based on the IEEE 802.16 standards, currently plays a noteworthy role. Throughout the chapter we survey current literature related to the delivery of multimedia data in WiMAX systems and, most importantly, identify research areas in which promising improvement opportunities exist. We start by portraying how both market and technical conditions have encouraged the adoption of WiMAX, and then, by building upon a fundamentals introduction, we focus on issues related to capacity and frame assembly. We also identify relevant aspects related to scheduling and mapping between user applications and WiMAX services. We close the chapter with a discussion on quality of service in wireless systems and visit the mathematical background of opportunistic scheduling for WiMAX.

Concepts and Architectures for Mobile Context-Aware Applications

Context-awareness has been investigated for almost a decade and is considered as a convenient and desirable feature in distributed mobile systems since it allows these systems to benefit from the changes in their users’ context to dynamically tailor services to their users’ current situation and needs. This chapter addresses the research results and challenges of designing a flexible infrastructure to support the development of mobile context-aware applications. We discuss relevant context-awareness concepts, define architectural patterns on context-awareness, present the design of a target infrastructure, and discuss some related research and research trends. The context-aware infrastructure described in this chapter follows the principles of service-oriented architectures in which the dynamic customization of context-aware mobile services is specified by means of application behavior rules that are interpreted and applied by the infrastructure at runtime.

Novel Results on MBMS Service Provisioning in UMTS/WLAN Heterogeneous Architectures

The support of broadcasting and multicasting as an efficient L3-based service poses rigorous requirements to the next generation mobile communication architectures. When IP multicasting has been seriously considered in mobile systems, soon has emerged the proposal of Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) for 3G networks and beyond. However, with the spreading of versatile heterogeneous wireless systems, like the cooperation of European 3G (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), the problem of wireless IP datacasting arises in more complicated ways. In order to extend MBMS for UMTS/WLAN heterogeneous architectures we approach a novel framework along with a suitable and efficient WLAN MAC (Media Access Control) extension. In this work we also evaluate the performance of our proposal using a discrete event simulation environment called OMNeT++.

Video and Data Dissemination in Mobile Broadcasting Environments

Data dissemination has already been identified as one of the most important aspects for mobile environments and particularly so for large volumes of data such as video, with the additional constraints of speedy, accurate, and isochronous delivery to thousands of users. With the adoption of mobile broadcasting standards this factor has increased in importance. In this chapter, we present the respective issues involved, technical as well as financial and regulatory. The reader is provided with a brief, yet concise, picture of the most important traditional broadcasting techniques and video broadcasting standards for the mobile environment. We then conclude with a detailed comparative evaluation in order to better understand the merits of each approach.

Enabling Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have seen a wealth of research efforts and practical implementations in recent years. With the advance of CMOS cameras and microphones, wireless multimedia sensor networks are proposed to be a promising solution to a variety of applications in surveillance and intrusion detection, smart traffic control, automated health care, environmental monitoring, and so forth. It is composed of wirelessly connected small devices, which are able to capture multimedia data from the surrounding environment, besides its capabilities of processing the multimedia data using the embedded CPU and transmitting data to the sink through wireless communication. In this chapter, we firstly address features of WMSNs and challenges facing the realization of WMSNs by introducing two experimental applications of WMSNs. As energy efficient routing and distributed source coding are two critical components for the success of WMSNs, we discuss existing work in these two areas subsequently, in order to reveal details about the challenges and potential solutions to the problems posed by WMSNs. At the end of this chapter, open problems on cross-layer design, quality of information and privacy and security are briefly discussed.