INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMSInt. J. Commun. Syst. 2011; 24:1243–1245Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.1349

Editorial

Advances in multimedia communications

Min Chen 1,*,†, Liang Zhou 2, Takahiro Hara 3, Yang Xiao 4 and Victor C. M. Leung 5

1Seoul National University, Korea2Nanjing Univ. of Posts and Telecommunications, China

3Osaka University, Japan4University of Alabama, AL, USA

5University of British Columbia, Canada

Recent advances in communications technologies have witnessed a growing and evolving multi-media content delivery market based on information gathering, manipulation, and dissemination.It is a fact that personal communications, computing, broadcasting, entertainment, etc. have turnedinto streams of multimedia content, and the various communication and network technologies havebecome the means to carry that content to a wide variety of terminals. Unlike traditional communi-cation systems, a fundamental challenge for present and future communication systems is the abilityto transport multimedia content over a variety of networks in an energy efficient manner at differentchannel conditions and bandwidth capacities with various requirements of QoS. There are manyissues that need to be addressed such as signal processing, collaborations, power management, flex-ible delivery, specialization of new content, dynamic access, telecommunications, networking, etc.,because of the multidisciplinary nature of the applications in advanced multimedia communications.

The goal of this issue is to bring together the state-of-the-art research contribution that describesoriginal and unpublished work addressing the new emerging techniques on multimedia communica-tions. Especially, we solicit research papers on addressing challenging issues existing for enablingmobile multimedia communications over heterogeneous infrastructure for realizing next generationnetworking and computing. For example, ubiquitous multimedia is a requirement in next genera-tion networks, such as multimedia adaption in wireless network; multimedia services in ubiquitouscircumstance; and improving distributed multimedia communication through location awareness,action awareness, user awareness, etc. On the other hand, because of the limited computationalpower, memory, and battery energy in wireless and portable terminals, power-efficient design alsoplays an important role in next-generation mobile multimedia applications.

We have received a large number of papers from both academia and industries that covered avariety of interesting topics related to multimedia communications. Two rounds of careful reviewby the guest editors and experts in the field led to nine papers for inclusion in this issue.

The first paper ‘Tournament-based congestion control protocol for multimedia streaming in ubiq-uitous sensor networks’ by Lee et al., addresses the issue of congestion and latency, which haveimpact on energy efficiency, memory size, buffer size, and throughput in the ubiquitous sensornetwork. The authors propose a new method, called TCCP (tournament-based congestion controlprotocol), where the winner is the stream with the highest importance level in the competition ofubiquitous sensor networks. In general, there are a lot of congestion and delay in the continuousstreaming of multimedia streams with lower importance level. The proposed method consists ofthree parts: tournament decision, best-fit control strategy, and service differentiation. The final win-ner in the tournament controls congestion effectively, minimizes packet loss because of congestion,decreases energy consumption, and improves QoS. The simulation result shows that the proposed

*Correspondence to: Min Chen, Seoul National University, Korea.†E-mail: minchen@ieee.org

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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method is more effective and has better performance compared with those of congestion control andfairness, priority based congestion control protocol, and congestion detection and avoidance.

In the paper ‘3D video communications challenges and opportunities’, Su et al. survey majortechniques in three-dimensional (3D) communications area, which covers the whole pipeline of the3D video communication framework, including 3D content creation, data representation, compres-sion, delivery, decompression, post-processing, and 3D scene rendering stages. The authors alsohighlight a few features in the emerging 4G wireless systems that are critical for 3D communica-tions system design. At the end, the topics with potential but challenges, for example, 3D over 4Gnetworks, distributed 3D video coding, 3D multi-user communication, scalability, and universal 3Daccess, are discussed and pointed out to audiences for further investigation.

Liu et al., in the paper ‘Efficient temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264/AVC inter framedecoding’, propose an efficient TEC (temporal error concealment) algorithm for the H.264/AVCvideo coding standard. According to the variable motion compensation block sizes, the 4 � 4 sub-block is selected as the MV recovery unit to get more accurate motion vector (MV) recovery forthe lost macroblock (MB). The direction trend of the neighboring MVs is utilized as the basic ideaand the MV interpolation is employed to recover the MVs of the lost MB. The simulation resultsshow that the proposed efficient temporal error concealment algorithm can always achieve betterTEC performance compared with the existing TEC methods. Also, it can be widely employed in themultimedia communication systems with the video coding standard H.264/AVC.

In the paper ‘A stereoscopic video transmission algorithm for an IPTV network based on empir-ical data’ written by Lloret et al., the authors evaluate the QoS and quality of experience (QoE)of a stereoscopic IPTV service and study the performance of the codecs in existence to proposean algorithm to perform the appropriate decisions in the IPTV network. The algorithm is based onthe empirical data gathered from the network to provide the best QoE to the end users. Finally, theauthors show the measurements of the bandwidth, delay, and jitter of the transmitted stereoscopicIPTV when the algorithm is running, and they compare the QoS parameters when different codecsare chosen by the algorithm. Their test bench demonstrates that their proposal performs very wellwhen several network conditions are varied.

The paper ‘On the design of algorithms for mobile multimedia systems: a survey’ by Ma et al.,suggests that the existing solutions to multimedia in wired networks cannot directly apply to wire-less networks with lower bandwidth, higher latency, and higher burst error rate. Furthermore,these services could suffer from user’s mobility and the heterogeneity caused by different wirelesstechnologies (e.g., CDMA2000, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, Wi-Fi, LTE, and WiMAX). The paperthen reviews the issues and state-of-the-art solutions of mobile multimedia, focusing on multiratemulticast, scalable video coding, and QoS management. Besides, the opportunities and the chal-lenges of providing multimedia services in the next generation wireless mobile systems — 3GPPLong Term Evolution — are investigated.

In the paper ‘A novel low-power RF4CE-based communication framework for multimedia systemcontrol’, Koo et al. propose a novel low-power RF4CE-based communication framework (RCF) formultimedia system control to overcome many constraints of IR-based legacy solutions and supportenergy efficient multimedia communications. A remote control is a component that operates elec-tronic devices wirelessly issuing commands to consumer electronics (CE). Such existing remotecontrol solutions are based mainly on the infrared radiation technology with a line-of-sight bar-rier, and they lack various additional features such as bidirectional and richer communications,low-power consumption, and no line-of-sight barriers, which are needed for the flexibility and inter-operability of more intelligent new CE devices on the market. The proposed RCF framework isdesigned for multimedia control communication using smart phones, adopting the RF4CE protocol,which is a de facto radio frequency standard for CE remote control solutions. The analysis of energyconsumption and two verification scenarios, including the use of various CEs and smart phones,show that the proposed RCF framework provides good practical usage in terms of content-sharingand smart CE control.

Deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems in IMS networks entails a number of technical chal-lenges, because the decentralized model of peers’ communication comes in contradiction withthat of the client-server that is currently widely used for telecommunication services realization.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2011; 24:1243–1245DOI: 10.1002/dac

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Moreover, the charging schemes applied today in telecommunication networks are based on phys-ical link utilization business models that are not applicable on P2P systems, whereas, conventionalnetwork resources sharing in the context of telecommunication services, is realized with dedi-cated QoS reservation mechanisms, not applicable on P2P systems that are highly autonomous andself-organized. Additionally, P2P systems have been very less deployed, if not at all, in the imple-mentation of real-time communications. The main reason of this asymmetric development can beattributed to the inability of P2P systems to cope with the timing requirements that real-time com-munications imply for the network services and the limited perception of content quality and itsimplications for the quality of the communication link. With regard to this problem, in the paper‘Enabling live video streaming services realization in telecommunication networks using P2P tech-nology’, Efthymiopoulos et al., present a P2P system that is able to cope with the QoS settings ofthe network and therefore is suitable for accommodating real-time video streaming applications.

Huang et al. in the study called ‘A personalized mobile IPTV system with seamless video recon-struction algorithm in cloud networks’ present a personalized mobile IPTV system based on a cloudnetwork. The system allows users to browse their favorite multimedia videos in the cloud networksthrough mobile devices without the trouble of repeated and complex searches of multimedia files.It can automatically search for nearby multimedia data that users are browsing, and reconstruct dis-persed video contents through a seamless video reconstruction algorithm for integration into videodata for continuous play. Seamless video reconstruction algorithm splits each original image intodifferent parts, obtains the feature values of the images, and then compares multimedia files withapproximate video section characteristics. The study focuses on the design and implementation ofa seamless video reconstruction algorithm on video streaming service, and validation of the accu-racy of the theories and the algorithm through the proposed system are presented in this paper. Thissystem was tested and validated with success.

In the last paper ‘Identifying QoS violations through statistical end-to-end analysis’, Zhou et al.investigate that multimedia transmission over a network is susceptible to various runtime impair-ments such as process failure, network congestion or link error. Existing work usually determinessuch QoS violations through condition–action rules, which trigger corresponding actions oncepredescribed conditions are satisfied. However, the results of such rigid rules are often not satis-factory in practice in that there has been little serious study with respect to the relationship betweenthe root cause of a QoS violation and an observed violation phenomenon. This paper introduces astatistical approach to the analysis of QoS violations. They propose and validate through experi-ments that: (1) a type of QoS violation will present consistent symptoms in terms of the observedapplication performance and end-to-end traffic pattern. Such a violation can be recognized once thesimilar symptoms repeat during a QoS session. (2) QoS violations of different nature (e.g., caused byshortage of different resources) will present diverse symptoms. Using a set of end-to-end statistics,they are able to describe and differentiate between QoS violations. They propose a fast orthonormalalgorithm for real-time training/classification of QoS violations and prove that this algorithm isuniversal approximation. They also extend the scope of hidden neurons from kernel functions toadditive functions for higher classification accuracy.

We would like to thank all the reviewers for their efforts and constructive comments. We would inparticular like to thank Professor Mohammad Obaidat, the Editor-in-Chief, for his support and help-ful suggestions during the very delicate stages of concluding the special issue. Finally, we wouldlike to thank all the authors who submitted their precious research work to this special issue.

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2011; 24:1243–1245DOI: 10.1002/dac