doiSerbia

Offensive and defensive adaptation in distributed multimedia systems

Tusch Roland (Institute of Information Technology, Klagenfurt University, Klagenfurt)
Böszörményi László (Institute of Information Technology, Klagenfurt University, Klagenfurt)
Goldschmidt Balázs (Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest)
Hellwagner Hermann (Institute of Information Technology, Klagenfurt University, Klagenfurt)
Schojer Peter (Institute of Information Technology, Klagenfurt University, Klagenfurt)

Adaptation in multimedia systems is usually restricted to defensive, reactive media adaptation (often called stream-level adaptation). We argue that offensive, proactive, system-level adaptation deserves not less attention. If a distributed multimedia system cares for overall, end-to-end quality of service then it should provide a meaningful combination of both. We introduce an adaptive multimedia server (ADMS) and a supporting middleware which implement offensive adaptation based on a lean, flexible architecture. The measured costs and benefits of the offensive adaptation process are presented. We introduce an intelligent video proxy (QBIX), which implements defensive adaptation. The cost/benefit measurements of QBIX are presented elsewhere [1]. We show the benefits of the integration of QBIX in ADMS. Offensive adaptation is used to find an optimal, user-friendly configuration dynamically for ADMS, and defensive adaptation is added to take usage environment (network and terminal) constraints into account.

Keywords: stream-level adaptation, server-level adaptation, MPEG-4, MPEG-7, MPEG-21