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

随着多媒体处理和网络技术、产品和服务的发展，交互交流的人数正在迅速增长。因此，多媒体通信服务开始消耗主干通信量的相当大份额。这凸显了高效传输实时媒体的问题。有效的多媒体通信需要适当的媒体感知和特定于应用的解决方案，如果没有这些解决方案，这些服务的全部好处将无法实现。不好的方法往往会导致系统性能下降，如客户端感知的不可接受的呈现质量，由于多媒体应用的高带宽特性而可能导致的网络崩溃，以及由于此类应用的无响应而被其他网络流观察到的性能差。这项研究的重点是设计和评估端到端的可靠多媒体服务解决方案。然而，开发能够满足当今广泛的多媒体应用需求的通用解决方案是一项具有挑战性的任务。这种方法的结果要么是一个不必要的复杂协议，要么是一个无法真正实施的非常高级别的协议，无法利用媒体的具体特征。研究人员的目标是开发一套多媒体传输协议(MMTP)，该协议集成了媒体属性、应用程序要求和网络特性，使得呈现质量在率失真意义上是最佳的。

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.