Multimedia streaming revolution
The quality of service (QoS) or overall performance of real-time multimedia applications like digital and 3D TV, social networking, video-on-demand, interactive gaming and video conferencing can suffer from various issues. These include high bandwidth usage, power limits and a wireless transmission environment where an error is easily caused. Along with the increasing demand for seamless multimedia streaming, comes the need for novel approaches to multimedia processing and communications that give priority to the requirements of mobile users. With this in mind, the EU-funded QOSTREAM (Video quality driven multimedia streaming in mobile wireless networks) project looked at new methods to tweak multimedia signal processing and communication parameters in order to ensure the finest video quality during transmission. Under the project, researchers from Brazil, Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US focused their efforts on state-of-the-art solutions for multimedia streaming over emerging wireless networks. The solutions were designed to adjust themselves to network conditions and to receiver devices, ensuring a better streaming experience overall. QOSTREAM elaborated new streaming packet monitoring and continuous subjective video quality gathering solutions for Android devices, in addition to solutions for evaluating the video quality for multimedia applications. The outcomes led to numerous publications on the topic. In parallel the project team held a workshop in 2013 to explore such novel techniques. Once developed and commercialised, QOSTREAM innovative system designs will have enhanced functionalities never before seen in multimedia streaming. The project’s results are bound to support optimal functionality of multimedia delivery in future wireless networks.
Keywords
Multimedia, streaming, video quality, wireless networks, QOSTREAM
