Managing video data in a mobile environment

Abstract

Two key technological trends of the last few years have been the emergence of handheld computational elements and the implementation of practical wireless communication networks. These two changes have made mobile computer systems feasible. While there has been much research interest devoted to mobile computer issues, such systems have not yet been commercially successful. This has been ascribed to the lack of a killer mobile app . We believe that the support of video on mobile systems will indeed make possible many new interesting applications. However, providing mobile video is a non-trivial task, and much work needs to be done before practical systems are widely available. In this short note we address the issue of mobile multimedia from a practitioner's perspective. We note what software and hardware are currently available in the market in support of mobile multimedia, and point out some of their deficiencies. We also discuss some of the communication and data management research issues that need to be tackled in order to address said deficiencies. Exploring these research issues is the focus of our project.