A Framework for Personalized Utility-Aware IP-Based Multimedia Consumption

Providing transparent and augmented use of multimedia con-tent across a wide range of networks and devices is still a challenging task within the multimedia research community. Multimedia adaptation was figured out as a core concept to overcome this issue. Most multimedia adaptation engines for providing Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) scale the content under consideration of terminal capabilities and re-source constraints but do not really consider individual user preferences. This paper introduces an adaptive multimedia framework which offers the user a personalized content vari-ation for satisfying his/her individual utility preferences. 1

Towards QoS Improvements of TCP-Based Media Delivery

Abstract—The amount of audiovisual data available on the Internet and thus of multimedia communication over today’s networks is increasing at a rapid pace. Despite the availability of specific media transport protocols like RTP, most content providers make use of the well-established and reliable TCP protocol to deliver audiovisual content over the Internet. The reason is that TCP-based data delivery in general is much less complicated for the clients to be served and over today’s networks traversed (including proxies and firewalls), than making use of UDP-based RTP connections. However, in case of network bandwidth fluctuations and packet losses, TCP-based media delivery may lead to annoying jerky playback at the client side, due to retransmissions and late arrival of media data. This papers deals with TCP-based perceptual QoS improvement mechanisms for increasing the media experience for the consumer under unstable network conditions. Our approach is based on media content adaptation (transcoding) to fit the actual network bandwidth continuously monitored by the sender. The proposed mechanisms are applied at the application level at the server side, leaving the existing TCP implementation untouched and therefore enabling transparent use of existing media players. An evaluation of a realistic use case is presented which underlines the efficacy of our approach. I

A framework for utility-based multimedia adaptation

Content adaptation is an important issue of multimedia frameworks in order to achieve universal multimedia access (UMA), i.e., to enable consumption of multimedia content independently of the given resource limitations, terminal capabilities, and user preferences. The digital item adaptation (DIA) standard, one of the core specifications of the MPEG-21 framework, supports content adaptation considering a wide range of networks, devices, and user preferences. Most adaptive multimedia frameworks targeting the UMA vision do not consider utility aspects in their adaptation decisions. This paper focuses on a generic semantic-based audio-visual utility model for DIA that aims to enhance the multimedia experience for the user. Our proposed model is able to take the semantics and the perceptual features of the content as well as the users’ specific utility aspects into account. Based on a detailed analysis of these constraints, we will show how the model reacts on individual input data. For choosing the best adaptation decision considering resource limitations on client and server sides as well as network characteristics, we evaluate four algorithms for performing this adaptation decision taking task. We will discuss results according to some use case scenarios

Utility model-based adaptation of multimedia content

Utility model-based adaptation is used to provide the best possible experience to the user consuming multimedia content under given user preferences, device, and network constraints

An H.264/SVC-based adaptation proxy on a WiFi router

Recent advances in video coding technology like the scalable extension of the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video coding standard pave the way for computationally cheap adaptation of video content. In this paper we present our work on a lightweight RTSP/RTP proxy that enables in-network stream process-ing. Based on an off-the-shelf wireless router that runs a Linux-based firmware we demonstrate that the video adap-tation can be performed on-the-fly directly on a network device. The paper covers design and implementation details of the proxy as well as a discussion about the actual adapta-tion of the SVC stream. Based on experimental evaluations we show that our approach can handle a reasonable number of concurrent sessions for a typical home deployment sce-nario. Furthermore, the paper covers possible applications in which adaptation on the network device can be beneficial