Enhancing the Multimedia Experience in Emerging Networks: Rate-Distortion Optimization in Multimedia Networking

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

As multimedia processing and networking technologies, products and services evolve, the number of people communicating interactively is growing rapidly. Consequently, multimedia communication services are starting to consume a considerable share of the backbone traffic. This highlights the problem of transmitting real-time media efficiently. Effective multimedia communication demands appropriate media-aware and application-specific solutions, without which the full benefits of such services will not be realized. Poor approaches often lead to such system performance degradations as unacceptable presentation quality perceived by the clients, possible network collapse due to the high-bandwidth nature of multimedia applications, and poor performance observed by other network flows due to the unresponsiveness of such applications. Given the fact that existing protocol suites are unable to provide the desired features, the study of media-aware transport protocols is overdue. The focus of this research is on the design and evaluation of end-to-end solutions for reliable multimedia services. Nonetheless, it is a challenging task to develop a generic solution that can satisfy the needs of the broad range of multimedia applications available today. Such an approach would result either in an unnecessarily complicated protocol that is far beyond real implementation or in a very high-level one that cannot exploit the specific features of the media. The investigators' aim is to develop a suite of Multimedia Transport Protocols (MMTP) that integrate media properties, application requirements, and network characteristics in such a way that the presentation quality is optimal in the rate-distortion sense.