Next Steps in Multimedia Networking

Abstract

This chapter presents in brief background knowledge on multimedia communication: multimedia applications and services, network and user QoS requirements, bandwidth on demand, multicasting, media synchronization, adaptive media coding, multimedia streaming, and end-system support for multimedia communication. In the second part, it deals with content delivery networks (CDNs). In the third part, it concentrates on issues for achieving multimedia optimization over heterogeneous wireless and wired networks. In the fourth part, it presents the main approaches for QoS guarantees over the Internet. This part tries to include the important aspects that have significantly impacted the enhancements to the basic Internet architecture and its associated protocols. In the fifth part, the chapter presents future Internet architectures. This is followed by some future research directions in multimedia networking.