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M-Pipe - The Media Pipe
M-Pipe had as main objective to create technology that allows efficient media streaming over heterogeneous networks and access technologies.
Impact
Through its research efforts, M-Pipe stimulated economic growth by allowing for cheaper, and lower entrance costs, and more efficient solutions for real-time streaming of media over heterogeneous networks, access methods and terminal capabilities.
M-Pipe had impact on the research communities and the precompetitive co-operation by the activities of dissemination at international conferences and standardisation committees.
M-Pipe's main innovation
The M-Pipe vision was that streaming of media over networks should be as simple as delivering water through pipes. The resources used by the media stream should be locally and autonomously adapted to the local conditions, and the utilisation of the available resources should be maximised.
To enable this vision, M-Pipe took the approach that the streamed media should be scalable, and that network units can with low-complex operations adapt the bit-rate to the current conditions. Research going beyond the current state-of-art is necessary in a number of areas:
- Scalable source coding: While scalable source coding has been around for a long time, there has always been a large efficiency gap between scalable coders and non-scalable coders. M-Pipe tried to overcome this gap for audio and video, developing scalable coders that are competitive with state-of-art non-scalable coders.
- Networking and signalling: To allow local and autonomous adaptation, this was supported by the network architecture and by he required signalling. M-Pipe tried to develop a cross-layer signalling concept to support local adaptation. The signalling concept should also support lower layer optimization methods. The M-Pipe solution was focused on the network aspects (which is different from approaches that focus on user references).
- Lower layer optimisation: Scalable source coding allows, if sufficient information is available, optimisation at the lower layers. The signalling developed in M-Pipe was meant to support lower layer optimisation, and the project studied different methods for such optimisation. Different targets have been set up, such as more efficient use of the available resources (meaning higher capacity for the system) and higher perceived quality for a given resource usage.
M-Pipe's results so far
After the start 1 October 2004 the project set off on two main tasks:
- The first was to perform research in the technology areas of scalable source coding (audio and video) and lower layer optimisation. The objective with this research is to explore the potential in these areas.
- The second main task was to identify service and networking scenarios as well as to define requirements on signalling to enable a solution as outlined by M-Pipe. The signalling requirement definition was followed up with the development of a signalling concept.
The main results can be summarised as:
- Service and network scenarios defined
- Physical layer scenarios defined
- Signalling requirements defined and a novel signalling concept has been developed
- Great success in the area of scalable coding for video - the M-Pipe candidate selected as first working draft by standardisation organisation JVT (supported by MPEG and ITU)
- Good results in basic research for scalable coding for audio and speech
- New, interesting findings in the area of error control coding
- New solutions for resource reservation and resource use at physical layer developed
In addition to this, outstanding dissemination results have been reached. In standardisation of a scalable video codec in ITU-T VCEG, ISO/IEC MPEG and more recently in the combined efforts of ITU and MPEG in the Joint Video Team (JVT)
The M-Pipe developed candidate has been rated best in test (three times) and is currently first working draft for the ongoing standardisation. In addition, M-Pipe has presented papers at leading international research conferences in the areas of networking and signalling, scalable source coding, error control coding and physical layer.
More details
- Annual Report 2005 (PDF, 48KB)
- Annual Public Report 2006 (PDF, 585KB)
- M-PIPE project public web site
Administrative details
M-Pipe (contract 4790) started on 1 October 2004 and ended on 31 March 2007. The total budget of M-Pipe was of 3.9 M€ and the requested EC contribution of 2.5 M€. The total effort has been of 462 person-months. Nine partners from six European countries have been involved in the project.
List of participants
- Ericsson AB, Sweden (coordinator)
- University College Dublin, Ireland
- International University Bremen, Germany
- Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
- Siemens AG Österreich, Austria
- Ericsson Hungary Ltd., Hungary
- Fraunhofer, Heinrich Hertz Institute, Germany
- Upzide Labs AB, Sweden
- Ecole Nationale Superior d'Electronique et ses Applications, France
Contact persons
- Co-ordinator
- Stefan Håkansson, Ericsson AB