Scalable and Energy-Efficient Multimedia Content Sharing over New Generation Computing and Communication Platforms

在过去的十年中，我们见证了用于网络多媒体处理和共享的新一代社交、移动和云计算的快速演变。如今，高清视频甚至3D/多视点视频都可以通过个人计算设备轻松捕获和浏览，并通过远程云资源方便地处理和存储。用户现在主动参与到社交生态系统中，而不是被动地接受媒体内容。3G/4G无线网络和智能移动设备的深度渗透进一步推动了这场革命，这些设备与在线社交网络和媒体共享服务无缝集成。尽管带宽和计算资源日益丰富，但用户生成的媒体内容的数据量不断增加，社会化共享的无限覆盖给内容和网络服务提供商带来了前所未有的挑战。高度多样化的媒体内容类型、来源、分发渠道进一步推动了网络共享系统中不同组件之间的复杂交互。因此，我们提出了以下关键问题：如何利用最新的社交、移动、云计算和通信平台在海量客户端之间高效地生成和分发海量媒体内容？除了可扩展性，能源也成为这些新一代计算和通信平台的一个关键问题。在移动终端方面，高度受限的电池组长期以来一直是充电之间服务时间的瓶颈；在云端，数据中心众所周知是耗电的。大量使用CPU、GPU、存储和网络资源的计算和带宽密集型多媒体服务肯定会使情况变得更糟。据预测，多媒体能源消耗将以每年16%的速度增长，占这些服务年度运营支出的一半。为了实现任何人、任何时间、任何地点的可扩展和高能效媒体共享的最终目标，需要在连贯的框架下重新审视和联合优化各方面的技术进步。在这项拟议的长期研究中，我们将在最新的计算和通信环境中解决上述挑战。我们不仅将重点放在单个组件的优化上，从媒体内容生成、网络和云资源分配、社交媒体传播，到云和本地设备中的节能媒体计算和通信，还将关注它们之间的交互，这给设计师带来了额外的问题。彻底了解这一复杂系统中的模块及其相互作用，将有助于在新兴的数字娱乐/商业世界中开发社交媒体、IPTV、电影点播、视频会议和互动在线游戏等基本服务。我们预计6名博士和9名硕士学生将在整个5年制课程中接受培训。这些HQP，加上我们研究的技术创新，将有助于保持加拿大在数字和社交媒体服务开发和部署方面的领先地位。

In the past decade, we have witnessed the fast evolution toward a new generation of social, mobile and cloud computing for networked multimedia processing and sharing. Today, high-definition videos and even 3D/multiview videos can be readily captured and browsed by personal computing devices, and conveniently processed and stored with remote cloud resources. The users are now actively engaged to be part of a social ecosystem, rather than passively receiving media content. The revolution is being driven further by the deep penetration of 3G/4G wireless networks and smart mobile devices that are seamlessly integrated with online social networking and media sharing services. Despite the increasingly abundant bandwidth and computation resources, the ever increasing data volume of user generated media content and the boundless coverage of socialized sharing have presented unprecedented challenges to both content and network service providers. The highly diversified media content types, origins, distribution channels further impose complex interactions among the different components in a networked sharing system. We thus ask the following critical question: how can the massive media content be efficiently generated and distributed among massive clients with the latest social, mobile, and cloud computing and communication platforms? Besides scalability, energy has become a critical concern with these new generation computation and communication platforms, too. On the mobile terminal side, the highly constrained battery reservoir has long been a bottleneck in service time between recharges; on the cloud side, the datacenters are known to be power-hungry. The computation- and bandwidth-intensive multimedia services that extensively use CPU, GPU, storage, and network resources certainly make the situation worse. Is has been predicted that multimedia energy consumption is rising at 16% per year, accounting for half of the annual operating expenditure of these services. To achieve the ultimate goals of scalable and energy-efficient media sharing for anyone, anytime, and anywhere, technology advances in various aspects need to be re-examined and jointly optimized under a coherent framework. In this proposed long-term research, we will address the above challenges in the latest computing and communication environments. We will focus not only on the optimization of individual components, ranging from media content generation, network and cloud resource allocation, social media propagation, to energy-efficient media computation and communications in cloud and in local devices, but also on their interactions that pose additional problems to designers. A thorough understanding of the modules in this complex system as well as their interactions will facilitate the development of such essential services as social media, IPTV, movie-on-demand, video conferencing, and interactive online gaming in the emerging digital entertainment/business world. We expect six PhD and nine MSc students be trained throughout the 5-year program. These HQPs, together with the technology innovations from our research, will help with maintaining Canada’s lead in the development and deployment of digital and social media services.