Multimedia coding and communication for network applications

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Multimedia streaming spans a wide range of network applications, from video conferencing and voice over IP(VoIP) to TV broadcasting over the Internet (IP-TV). Streaming, as current estimates suggest, accounts for more than a quarter of the overall Internet traffic. As such, efficient solutions to media streaming problem have the potential to directly impact the Internet's bandwidth economy. Current streaming solutions essentially separate network media communication into two layers: media compression layer and network communication layer. In contrast, the proposed research aims at developing new solutions that go beyond the current, layered, approaches. The development of these new solutions is based on the realization that there is an inherent loss of performance when media processing and network delivery methods are designed separately. By a joint consideration of source compression and network communication, our developed solutions will be able to utilize available network infrastructures and bandwidth resources more efficiently. To realize this potential, an optimization framework will be developed that captures the complex entanglement of source coding and network communication. The objective of such optimization will be to maximize a collective measure of quality of service to all network clients, given the bandwidth constraints of the underlying network. Well studied network communication strategies (e.g., routing or network coding) and source coding elements (e.g., progressive coding or more general multiple description coding) will be jointly optimized within this framework. Simple examples (such as the one reported in te proposal) suggest that the impact of using these new approaches to digital multimedia distribution can be significant.Finally, The proposed research will be more than a pursue in efficient algorithms and network protocols. It will also provide new insights into the innate correlation of source coding and network communication and the fundamental tradeoffs between the quality of service possible to different network clients, and advances the scientific knowledge on network communication of compressible sources.