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

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As multimedia processing and networking technologies, products andservices evolve, the number of people communicating interactivelyis growing rapidly. Consequently, multimedia communicationservices are starting to consume a considerable share of thebackbone traffic. This highlights the problem of transmittingreal-time media efficiently. Effective multimedia communicationdemands appropriate media-aware and application-specificsolutions, without which the full benefits of such services willnot be realized. Poor approaches often lead to such systemperformance degradations as unacceptable presentation qualityperceived by the clients, possible network collapse due to thehigh-bandwidth nature of multimedia applications, and poorperformance observed by other network flows due to theunresponsiveness of such applications.Given the fact that existing protocol suites are unable to providethe desired features, the study of media-aware transport protocolsis overdue. The focus of this research is on the design andevaluation of end-to-end solutions for reliable multimediaservices. Nonetheless, it is a challenging task to develop ageneric solution that can satisfy the needs of the broad range ofmultimedia applications available today. Such an approach wouldresult either in an unnecessarily complicated protocol that is farbeyond real implementation or in a very high-level one that cannotexploit the specific features of the media. The investigators' aimis to develop a suite of Multimedia Transport Protocols (MMTP)that integrate media properties, application requirements, andnetwork characteristics in such a way that the presentationquality is optimal in the rate-distortion sense.