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，互动交流的人数正在迅速增长。因此，多媒体通信服务开始消耗骨干通信量的相当大份额。这就突出了有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，没有这些解决方案，这些服务的全部好处将无法实现。糟糕的方法通常会导致系统性能下降，如客户端无法接受的表现质量，由于多媒体应用程序的高带宽特性可能导致网络崩溃，以及由于此类应用程序的无响应而导致其他网络流观察到的性能下降。鉴于现有协议组无法提供所需的特性，对媒体感知传输协议的研究已经过期。本研究的重点是可靠多媒体服务的端到端解决方案的设计和评估。然而，开发通用的解决方案以满足当今广泛的多媒体应用程序的需求是一项具有挑战性的任务。这种方法要么会产生一个不必要的复杂协议，远远超出实际实现的范围，要么会产生一个非常高级的协议，无法利用媒体的具体特性。研究人员的目标是开发一套多媒体传输协议（MMTP），该协议将媒体属性、应用需求和网络特性集成在一起，从而使呈现质量在速率失真意义上达到最佳。

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.