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Introduction to the Issue on Network-Aware Multimedia Processing and Communications
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S a result of significant changes in multimedia architectures, which are evolving from centralized to distributed and self-organizing structures, and in multimedia applications, multimedia content processing has shifted towards distributed, scalable, and multi-modal models; and multimedia communications have focused more on resource-constrained, cross-layered, and cooperative designs. For reasons of simplicity and tractability, the models and system designs have been generally both network-independent and content-independent. To exploit their potential interaction and make use of the network characteristics, network-aware multimedia processing and communication are currently increasingly active areas of research and practical system design. This special issue brings together contributions from researchers and practitioners in the area of network-aware multimedia signal processing and communications. The special issue is organized in two sections: a) network-aware multimedia processing, and b) network-aware multimedia communications. The first set of four articles addresses network-aware multimedia processing solutions for distributed coding, peer-to-peer video streaming, scalable video streaming, and cross-modality transcoding. These articles are highlighted in the following paragraphs. The article “Distributed Source Coding for Multimedia Multicast Over Heterogeneous Networks” by Stankovic et al., explores the design of a network-aware cross-layer multimedia multicast approach for heterogeneous wireless-and-wireline networks using distributed coding. In the proposed method, the encoded multimedia data are broadcasted to multiple Internet servers over a shared wireless link. Each server employs distributed source coding by exploiting mutual correlation among the different signals received by the corresponding (different) servers. The final receiver collects bitstreams from the servers before performing joint decoding. The paper develops an optimal nonuniform scalar quantizer, and a joint source-channel coding scheme that combines error-protection at the base station and distributed source coding at the servers. The second article, “A Flexible Multiple Description Coding Framework for Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming” by Akyol et al., proposes a novel adaptive peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming system that features a flexible multiple description coding framework and an adaptive TCP-friendly rate-controlled, on-demand, many-to-one P2P video streaming solution based on the proposed framework. The article shows that the network-aware adaptation of the number, type of descriptions, and the rate and redundancy level of each description yields significantly higher performance than that of other scalable multiple description schemes using a fixed number of descriptions/layers with fixed rate and redundancy level. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTSP.2007.901505
The third article, “Congestion Control for Scalable Video Streaming Using the Scalability Extension of H.264/AVC” by Nguyen and Ostermann, examines the problem of how to adapt the transmitted rate (congestion control) and what is transmitted (spatial/temporal/quality scalability of the coded video) to maximize the end-user quality given estimates of the time-varying available bandwidth. The authors propose a new congestion control algorithm for scalable video coding and show its advantages relative to conventional congestion control algorithms. The fourth article, “TeleMorph: A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Network-Aware Transmoding in Mobile Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Systems” by Solon et al. focuses on a crossmodality adaptation platform that makes adaptation decisions in mobile presentation systems depending on bandwidth fluctuations. TeleMorph has been implemented as a network-aware fuzzy inference system and tested using TeleTuras—a tourist information application. The next set of five papers addresses network-aware multimedia communications solutions for resource allocation, congestion control, and error control, which are highlighted next. The fifth article, “A Pricing Mechanism for Resource Allocation in Wireless Multimedia Applications” by Fu et al., discusses multiuser resource allocation for wireless multimedia applications deployed by autonomous and noncollaborative wireless stations (WSTASs). To overcome the inefficient resource allocations due to the network manipulation by selfish WSTASs, the article presents a pricing mechanism for message exchanges between the WSTASs and the Central Spectrum Moderator, in which the messages represent network-aware resource demands and corresponding prices. The authors prove that the message exchanges reach the Nash equilibrium and that the resulting equilibrium messages generate allocations that are efficient, budget balanced and satisfy voluntary participation. The sixth article, “Joint Uplink and Downlink Optimization for Real-Time Multiuser Video Conferencing over WLANs” by Su et al., examines the problem of providing interactive multiuser communication over 802.11 networks. The authors show that improved performance can be achieved by accounting for the video content and network resources, and then applying cross-layer error protection and performing dynamic bandwidth resource allocation across the multiple users for both uplinks and downlinks. The seventh article, “Cooperative Source and Channel Coding for Wireless Multimedia Communications” by Shutoy et al., focuses on cooperative communications strategies for multimedia transmission over slow fading channels. The authors propose to jointly allocate bits among source coding, channel coding and cooperation to minimize the expected distortion of the reconstructed signal at the receiver; and to protect the more important bits through user cooperation. The article
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compares single layer and multiple layer source coding with unequal error protection, with and without cooperation, and shows that cooperation can significantly reduce the expected end-to-end distortion and that layered cooperation provides further improvements over a wider range of channel qualities. The eighth article, “Predictive Path Switching Control for Improving the QoS in Real-Time Applications” by Ye and Parlos, discusses dynamic prediction of network traffic congestion among the multiple available paths in a network, with the goal of predicting the best path for use in real-time applications such as VoIP. The ninth and last article, “Smart Media Striping Over Multiple Burst-Loss Channels” by Cheung et al., focuses on the potential benefits of striping media traffic, and develops algorithms that take advantage of these benefits to optimize the delivery of delay-sensitive media streams to a wireless multi-homed device community. By inverse-multiplexing or striping packets across multiple WWAN channels, the goodput of delay-sensitive media traffic can be improved by striping FEC and ARQ packets across available channels. We hope the readers find the papers in this special issue to be insightful and stimulating for new directions of research in network-aware multimedia processing and communications. We would like to express our thanks to all of the authors who made submissions to this special issue, and to the many reviewers for their sustained effort and multiple rounds of reviews. We also
thank Dr. K. J. Ray Liu for his enthusiastic encouragement of this special issue from the very start, and Dr. Lee Swindlehurst, the Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING, for his support. ADRIANA DUMITRAS, Guest Editor Apple, Inc. Cupertino, CA 95014 USA
[email protected] HAYDER RADHA, Guest Editor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
[email protected] JOHN APOSTOLOPOULOS, Guest Editor Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA
[email protected] YUCEL ALTUNBASAK, Guest Editor Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332–0250 USA
[email protected]
Adriana Dumitras (SM’02) received the Ph.D. degrees in electronics and telecommunications from the “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania, and electrical and computer engineering from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Prior to her joining Apple, Inc. as a Senior Scientist, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member with AT&T Labs.—Research, a tenured Associate Professor the “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, and held R&D positions with the National Research Council of Canada. Her research interests are in the area of video/multimedia compression and transmission, robust content-based and object-based video analysis and coding, and network-aware processing and communications. She authored two books and co-authored over 80 publications, six granted and several pending U.S. patents. Dr. Dumitras is an elected member of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee, IEEE Multimedia Systems and Applications Technical Committee and the Area Editor of Columns and Forums (2006–2008) of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. She was a guest co-editor of the special issue “Video Analysis and Coding for Robust Transmission” in the Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing (2006), an associate editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2003–), and a technical co-Chair of the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (2006). She was the head of the Canadian delegation at ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC29/WG 11 (MPEG) (1998–1999). She was the youngest co-recipient of the Romanian Academy Award (1996).
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Hayder Radha (SM’01) received the B.S. degree (with honors) from Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, in 1984, the M.S. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1986, and the Ph.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, New York, in 1991 and 1993, all in electrical engineering. He is a Professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at MSU and the associate chair for research and graduate studies of the ECE Department. Prior to joining MSU in 2000, he was with Philips Research (1996–2000) as a Principal Member of Research Staff, then as a Consulting Scientist and Philips Research Fellow; and with AT&T Bell Laboratories (1986–1996). His current research areas include video coding and communications, wireless and sensor networks, network coding, stochastic modeling of communication networks, and image and video processing. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 30 U.S. patents in these areas. Dr. Rahda served as co-chair and editor of the ATM and LAN Video Coding Experts Group of the ITU-T (1994–1996). He currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the Journal on Advances in Multimedia, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing. He is a recipient of numerous AT&T Bell Labs awards, the Withrow Distinguished Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to engineering, the Microsoft Research Content and Curriculum Award, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Theoretical Foundation, Cyber-Trust, and Research in Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) awards.
John Apostolopoulos (S’91–M’97–SM’06) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. He joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in 1997, where he is currently a Distinguished Technologist and R&D Project Manager for the Streaming Media Systems Group. He also teaches and conducts joint research at Stanford University, where he is a Consulting Assistant Professor of electrical engineering. In graduate school, he worked on the U.S. Digital TV standard, and received an Emmy Award Certificate for his contributions. Dr. Apostolopoulos received a best student paper award for part of his Ph.D. thesis, the Young Investigator Award (best paper award) at VCIP 2001, was named “one of the world’s top 100 young (under 35) innovators in science and technology” (TR100) by Technology Review in 2003, and was co-author for the best paper award at ICME 2006 on authentication for streaming media. His work on media transcoding in the middle of a network while preserving end-to-end security (secure transcoding) has recently been adopted by the JPEG-2000 Security (JPSEC) standard. He currently serves as vice-chair and member, respectively, of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s IMDSP and MMSP Technical Committees. He recently was co-guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Network on “Multimedia over Broadband Wireless Networks”, general co-chair of VCIP’06, and technical co-chair for ICIP’07. His research interests include improving the reliability, fidelity, scalability, and security of media communication over wired and wireless packet networks.
Yucel Altunbasak (SM’02) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. He joined Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories in July 1996. Meanwhile, he taught at Stanford and San Jose State Universities as a Consulting Assistant Professor. In 1999, he joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Altunbasak served as the technical program chair for ICIP 2006. He was an associate editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING; the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING; Signal Processing:Image Communications; and the Journal of Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing. He served as the lead guest editor on two Image Communications special issues on wireless video and video networking, respectively. He served as the vice-president for the IEEE Communications Society Multimedia Communications Technical Committee. He has been elected to the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s IMDSP, MMSP, and BISP Technical Committees. He has served as a co-chair for “Advanced Signal Processing for Communications” Symposia at ICC’03. He is a co-author for two conference papers that received the best student paper awards at ICIP’03 and VCIP’06. He also co-authored a conference paper that has been selected as design finalist at EMBS’2004. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.
