Open Service Platform for Pervasive Multimedia Services Development

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing and networking are providing us with growing business opportunities and demands for multimedia services. Consumer networks, increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. Meanwhile, for many multimedia services, security is an important component to restrict unauthorized multimedia content access and distribution. This suggests the need for new cryptography system implementations that can operate at different data rates, i.e., be scaled to various multimedia content, different network topology, changing bandwidth, and diverse receiver device capabilities. Content authentication is one important security tool for secure multimedia content communication. Conventional message authentication schemes do not offer suitable scalability for this new set of applications. In this paper, we study the design of scalable media data stream authentication when proxy caching is used and present a framework for multimedia authentication that supports various kinds of scalability.

Many people now receive various multimedia services through their personal devices via a home network. The rapid growth in multimedia content and smart devices means that multimedia services can encounter many problems in home networks. High volumes of storage capacity and processing resources are required manage these large amounts of media content. In addition, users may find it difficult to receive smooth streaming services in remote places because of limited remote access functions. To address these problems, we propose a model that uses cloud computing technology to store and manage large volumes of multimedia content. The proposed model provides remote access functions for receiving multimedia services in home networks and in wireless local area networks (WLANs). The model has four components, i.e., the Assistant Gateway, cloud server, remote controller, and media device renderer. The Assistant Gateway is an important component in the proposed model. It can access a cloud server to obtain multimedia content information before sending it to users in a home network. Thus, users can receive home media streaming services via the Assistant Gateway using a media device renderer. Based on this model, we implemented each component to support streaming service for users in remote areas.

Personalized multimedia (PMM) services are the emerging area in multimedia technology. A PMM service is a multimedia service requested according to the users personal profile which typically includes individual preferences, keeping the technical constraints of mobile terminal in use and operating environment. An important issue of authentication in PMM service platform is, "how does it determines who the mobile user is, if requests are allowed to come in from various communication channels and devices." We propose a transaction based authentication scheme for PMM service using cognitive agents. The proposed approach dynamically deploys authentication challenges based on mobile transaction sensitivity, users mobility and behaviors. The method has been simulated with a typical PMM service over in-house established wireless testbed, the results are time efficient and quite encouraging.

The paper presents an approach to the implementation of network multimedia services using a real time object model. The RTO.k model formalized earlier by K.H. Kim et al. (1994) as a timeliness guaranteed computing model forms the basis of our design methodology. We identified a generic structure of Multimedia Service Object System (MSOS) as a multimedia service programming paradigm. Each Scenario-RTO in an MSOS controls the flow of multimedia streams. A scenario is composed of a set of (time/message triggered) methods. Communications between MSOSs are handled by the Protocol-RTO. To provide an MSOS execution environment, we have developed a middleware named Windows Real Time Object System (WRTOS) on the top of the Windows OS and the MuX platform. The MuX was developed by ETRI to support basic multimedia service interfaces in heterogeneous distributed systems. This approach facilitates the development of multimedia services by easy formalization of services and parameterized service generation.

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing and networking are providing us with growing business opportunities and demands for multimedia services. Consumer networks, increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. Meanwhile, for many multimedia services, security is an important component to restrict unauthorized content access and distribution. This suggests the need for new cryptography system implementations that can operate at different data rates, i.e., be scaled to various multimedia content, different network topology, changing bandwidth, and diverse device capabilities. Encryption is used to ensure confidentiality of messages in communication. Conventional encryption schemes do not offer suitable scalability for this new set of applications. In this paper, we describe scalable encryption, discuss the applications for consumer multimedia access, present scalable encryption schemes that support various kinds of scalability, and present a scalable content access scheme using an algebraic based differentiable-decryption key public key crypto algorithm.

Discovering and redirecting multimedia services in a personalized manner is achieving increasing importance for mobile users. It is a powerful characteristic, one of the endless capabilities of mobile ecommerce technology. Regardless of their location, users are able to find and utilize services according to their needs and without complex configuration and preknowledge of service interfaces. In addition, they gain control over how, where, and when multimedia services are delivered. Mobile agent platforms may contribute significantly as a supporting component of the overall personalized multimedia service infrastructure. In order to appreciate the impact of MA-based solutions in personalized multimedia service platforms, we present a set of basic criteria related to mobile agents, which may evaluate their necessity and usage. Although it is not an exhaustive list of evaluation criteria, it is sufficient to cover a broad variety of areas under consideration regarding the involvement of mobile agents in service platforms.

There is a clear trend towards making multimedia applications context-aware so as to customize them by taking into account any collection of information which may be relevant, such as e.g. user location. However, current multimedia services are dominated by IMS, which is seen as a service platform that uses the SIP protocol to access all services that the Internet can provide. In this paper, we describe the Daidalos approach on making IMS based multi-media services context-aware. We also demonstrate, how generic sensor networks can be integrated into the context management system of our platform thus enabling sensor network detected events to influence behavior of context-aware multimedia applications.

The Intelligent Network (IN) architecture promises easy development and fast deployment of sophisticated communication services. In this paper, we present the results of our research in the area of Intelligent Multimedia Services. One of the main results has been the evaluation of novel multimedia services operating over different network platforms. One of the new services being designed is a Multimedia News-on-Demand application allowing users to browse through items of current affairs and select a specific article for viewing. This service is supplemented by an Intelligent Multimedia Gateway providing interConnectivity between the public service telephone network and the Internet. The study of this service has proved useful in gaining insight on the way novel intelligent multimedia services across network platforms will benefit from the use of IN technology. A performance evaluation of the service has also proved valuable to identify the major system and traffic parameters to consider when designing and deploying IN multimedia services across multiple networks.KeywordsService TimeTraffic LoadFile SizeDatabase ServerInterarrival TimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Regulating audiotex: Lessons for the future development and oversight of electronic information and telecommunication services

The paper is presenting an advanced QoS provisioning module with vertical multi-homing framework for future 5G mobile terminals (5GMT) with radio network aggregation capability and traffic load sharing in heterogeneous mobile and wireless environments. The proposed 5GMT framework is leading to high performance utility networks with high QoS provisioning for any given multimedia service and multi-RAT capabilities. It is using vertical multi-homing and virtual QoS routing algorithms within the mobile terminal, that is able to handle simultaneously multiple radio network connections via multiple wireless and mobile network interfaces. The performance of our proposed 5GMT is evaluated using simulations with multimedia traffic in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks under different network conditions.

For the last few years, video indexing and video compression have been considered as two separate functionalities. However, multimedia content is growing at such a rate that multimedia services will need to consider both the compression and the indexing aspects of the content in order to efficiently manage this audio-video content. Therefore, it is interesting to study the synergy between the representations of compression and indexing and in particular to find new schemas that allow the possibility to exploit indexing/compression information in order to increase the efficiency of video compression/indexing capabilities. The principal contribution of this paper is to study and develop new techniques where the compression efficiency of video codecs can be improved by the use of indexing metadata where indexing metadata refers to information that has been generated to support indexing capabilities.

Under SOA, QoS is one important factor of service selection for workflow. A wide range of attributes such as availability, reliability, performance, and reputation have been chosen to be criterions for QoS. However, in the domain of multimedia service, it has its unique characters, which might not be described and satisfied by generic QoS model. For example, video streaming does not need to get the fastest delivery network but it has well-defined requirements in its data rate. In this paper, we introduce a novel model to help multimedia service selection. Both the theory behind and its simulation study are presented. Our results show that quality requirement is a good guidance for multimedia service selection.

The new trends in the service area cause a change on the service providing architecture and scheme. The most obvious differences are multimedia services and multiparty communications. The existing service providing schemes can hardly catch up with these new trends. A few years ago, multimedia service was not applicable to the public networks, because of the shortage of transmission bandwidth. Nowadays, the transmission capabilities of the public networks have been continuously changing. Moreover, developing ATM technology is the most powerful driving force towards a B-ISDN era. The essential components which constitute the traditional schemes have been defined in the characteristic categories of transmission, terminal and switching. We define an additional component for the new B-ISDN services on public networks. We proposed a service-providing architecture to be implemented on an ATM-based switching system as a uniform service platform called service node system (SNS) for public telecommunication networks. The SNS will provide a high degree of efficiency for providing a variety of new services on ATM based telecommunication networks. We define various functions of the architecture and describe interaction schemes among its function modules. Also, some performance issues, such as network grade of service, and signalling transfer delay are considered in an attempt to verify the usefulness and the adequacy of the proposed architecture.

With the fast development of IP telephony, there is a need to quickly provide more powerful and competitive multimedia services in the IP network. A natural choice is to integrate the intelligent network and IP network and exploit the mature capabilities of service creation and service deployment of the intelligent network in the IP network. This paper addresses a new call model between the intelligent network and the IP network for supporting the advanced multimedia service in the IP network using H.323. Firstly, the reason why the existing IN basic call state model is not suitable to model H.323 signaling are analyzed, then an enhanced call model based layered structure in order to fully exploit the advantages introduced by H.323 is proposed. Finally, we present an approach of the IP-SSP architecture based on the proposed model to fulfill the integration between the IN and IP.

In this paper we provide the description of a new mobility service for an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) platform. It optimizes the operation of multimedia services in a wireless heterogeneous environment containing multiple access networks with different cost per bandwidth ratio. It extends the SIP Presence Service with mobility related information, i.e. Media Independent Handover (MIH). The terminals are able to exchange specific handover knowledge with the remote service provisioning infrastructure and to receive commands adapted to the profile of all the parties involved in multimedia sessions, transparent to the actual multimedia service. The system was designed to enable the adaptation of multimedia sessions to the profile of the users and to the momentary network conditions on an end-to-end basis.