Special Issue on Recent Advances in Distributed ... - IEEE Xplore

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Special Issue on Recent Advances in Distributed Multimedia Communications BY CHANG WEN CHEN, Fellow IEEE

Guest Editor WENJUN (KEVIN) ZENG, Senior Member IEEE

Guest Editor RALF STEINMETZ, Fellow IEEE

Guest Editor

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ith recent advances in digital media acquisition, storage, communication and networking technologies, multimedia has become an indispensable feature in our daily lives. Animation, audio and video are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet. A large number of distributed multimedia applications have been created, including Internet telephony, Internet This issue introduces videoconferencing, on-demand streaming or broadcasting, IPTV, distance recent developments learning, security surveillance, tele- in areas of presence, tele-health, environmental distributed multimedia monitoring, entertainment and gaming, communications with and multimedia messaging. theoretical and practical Networking and communication papers spanning a technologies continue to be key enablers for the deployment of new number of emerging multimedia services and the creation and interdependent of new distribution channels for networking and enterprise, business, civilian, and mil- communication itary applications. While the Internet technologies. is still undergoing significant development and expansion, new networking and communication paradigms and theory continue to emerge. For instance, new peer-to-peer (P2P) networking paradigms, which promise significant performance improvements over the traditional client-server architecture, have prompted the re-visitation of many technical issues related Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2007.910474

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Proceedings of the IEEE | Vol. 96, No. 1, January 2008

to distributed multimedia communications. Furthermore, the increasingly widespread use of low power wireless devices and multimedia sensors demands a paradigm shift in the design of the next generation multimedia communication systems. What we have witnessed is an underlying trend of decentralization and cooperation with potentially highly distributed management of resource, computation, processing, and communication. In addition, the demand for broadband communication systems and devices from a broad range of sectors including consumer, military and civilian, creates the need for an interdisciplinary research community to address new opportunities, directions, challenges and solutions. Research from the fields of multimedia communications, computer networking, information theory, multimedia signal processing, embedded systems and electronics are essential to realize the potential of pervasive distributed multimedia systems. This special issue is thus intended to introduce a wide range of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE readership 0018-9219/$25.00 Ó 2007 IEEE

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to a timely overview of recent developments in the diverse areas of distributed multimedia communications. The issue includes invited papers of both theoretical and practical interest from leading academic institutions and industrial corporations. These papers span a number of emerging and interdependent themes that include: Peer-to-peer technologies for multimedia content distribution, mesh networks for multimedia, multi-hop ad hoc networks, security issues in distributed multimedia applications, multimedia over heterogeneous networks, and home networking. The first two papers focus on the discussion of peer-to-peer technologies. P2P technologies provide a number of unique advantages such as ubiquity, resilience, and scalability, making it ideal for a wide variety of distributed multimedia applications. While P2P applications such as file sharing and voice over IP have gained tremendous popularity, video broadcast is still in its early stages, and its full potential is yet to be explored. Recently, P2P based broadcast has emerged as a promising technique, which has been shown to be cost effective and easy to deploy. In their article BOpportunities and Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Internet Video Broadcast,[ Jiangchuan Liu, Sanjay G. Rao, Bo Li and Hui Zhang review the state-of-the-art of P2P Internet video broadcast technologies, summarize the major issues associated with the design of broadcast overlays, and closely exam the trade-offs and potentials of the tree-based and datadriven approaches. The paper also outlines some key challenges and open problems, and discusses some future directions. The second paper related to P2P technologies is entitled: BPeer-to-Peer Live Multicast: A Video Perspective[ and contributed by Eric Setton, Pierpaolo Baccichet, and Bernd Girod. The authors assert that P2P multicast is promising for large-scale streaming video distribution over the Internet and argue that it is particularly challenging to transmit video

packets along unreliable multi-peer paths for a consistently high video quality and low end-to-end delay. This paper focuses on error- resilient transport for low-latency peer-to-peer video streaming and presents several broad categories of robust video streaming schemes for P2P live multicast applications. The next two papers cover multimedia distribution over mesh networks. New mesh network architectures are able to provide intrinsic diversity in terms of network paths, content servers, or source peers in order to reach the edge of the network at low cost. Making use of the benefits derived from mesh network architecture will bring improved performance for resource greedy applications such as media streaming services by proper aggregation of bandwidth and computing resources. The first paper by Pascal Frossard, Juan Carlos de Martin, and M. Reha Civanlar is entitled BDistributed Streaming with Network Diversity.[ This paper first presents an overview of distributed streaming solutions that profit from network diversity, including media coding techniques used for adaptive and flexible media streaming with network diversity. The paper also describes the routing, distributed path computation, and packet scheduling problems in multipath networks. The authors conclude that efficient multimedia services can be designed, when routing, coding and scheduling algorithms are able to adapt to both the media information, and the dynamic network infrastructures. The second paper by Spyros Xergias, Nikos Passas and Apostolis Salkintzis focuses on the IEEE standard 802.16 mesh networks and is entitled BCentralized Resource Allocation for Multimedia Traffic in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks.[ The authors assert that the IEEE 802.16 standard provides a high degree of flexibility for setting up and operating wireless broadband networks in metropolitan environments. In this paper, the authors investigate how efficiently an IEEE 802.16 mesh network can

treat distributed multimedia traffic by providing differentiated Quality of Service (QoS). In particular, the authors describe in detail one key component of the system named BEnhanced Frame Registry Tree Scheduler[ (E-FRTS) that provides QoS-aware resource allocation for multimedia over mesh networks. The third group of two papers addresses several key issues in multihop wireless networks, in particular the ad hoc networks, for contemporary multimedia applications. In general, these multi-hop wireless networks operate in a self-organized fashion without relying on fixed infrastructures. This type of wireless networks presents significant challenge for delivering adequate QoS to the end users because of their dynamic nature, infrastructureless architecture, and time-varying unstable links and topology. In their paper entitled BCross-Layer Design for QoS Support in Multi-hop Wireless Networks,[ Qian Zhang and Ya-Qin Zhang provide a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cross-layer design in multi-hop wireless networks and point out outstanding research challenges. The topics covered include joint channel assignment and routing, joint routing and rate allocation for streaming, network capacity planning, and joint scheduling and rate adaptation. The second paper in this group is entitled BMulti-Band Mobile Ad Hoc Links for Multimedia Communications[ and is authored by Hamid Gharavi. This paper addresses multiband transmission of real-time information such as video over multi-hop ad-hoc links. This is achieved by introducing a novel multiple-stream video compression approach that combines dual-band/dual-path routing and dual description video coding. The dual path routing protocol can guarantee a different frequency band for each path, thus reducing the probability of losing both routes at the same time for improved network reliability. It has been shown that the combination of the new routing protocol and dual description video coding can

Vol. 96, No. 1, January 2008 | Proceedings of the IEEE

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greatly enhance the ad-hoc network performance for video transmission. Security has become one of the major concerns in various distributed multimedia applications. The next two articles address the security and privacy issues in distributed multimedia communications. The article BQuality-Optimized and Secure End-to-End Authentication for Media Delivery[ by Qibin Sun, John Apostolopoulos, Chang Wen Chen, and Shih-Fu Chang first demonstrates the needs for new approach in delivering high quality authenticated streaming media since the conventional data authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to multimedia authentications. The article then describes in detail how to design efficient authentication schemes for multimedia delivery which exploit the unequal importance of different packets. The end-to-end quality of the authenticated media is optimized by allocating the authentication resources unequally across streamed packets based on their relative importance, thereby providing unequal authenticity protection. In their article BSecurity and Privacy for Distributed Multimedia Sensor Networks,[ Deepa Kundur, William Luh, Unoma Ndili Okorafor, and Takis Zourntos discuss design issues in security and privacy for the specific applications of distributed multimedia sensor networks where some paradigm shifting approaches may be necessary. The authors introduce the HoLiSTiC (Heterogeneous Lightweight Sensornets for Trusted Visual Computing) framework. Protection issues within this architecture are analyzed leading to the development of open research problems including secure routing in emerging free space optical sensor networks and distributed privacy for vision-rich sensor networking. The work demonstrates the necessary interaction among signal processing, networking and cryptography. The next group of three papers aims to improve distributed multime8

dia communications by making best use of emerging technologies and new approaches. The first paper in this group BLocation Awareness: Improving Distributed Multimedia Communication[ by Aleksandra Kovacevic, Oliver Heckmann, Nicolas Liebau, and Ralf Steinmetz argues that geographical location-awareness greatly helps distributed multimedia communication. The authors show that incorporating location information can increase the quality of multimedia content delivery and at the same time satisfies the growing need for more personalized, location-based services. In particular, the authors introduce an overlay structure for distributed multimedia systems with location aware capability that is capable of making use of the locations of its nodes to optimize node-to-node communication for performance and delay. The next paper in this group is entitled BAutonomic Multimedia Communications: Where Are We N o w ?[ I n t h e i r c o n t r i b u t i o n , Xiaoyuan Gu, John Strassner, Jiang Xie, Lars Wolf and Tatsuya Suda argue that today’s multimedia communication systems are experiencing convoluted complexity due to the abundance of rich content and heterogeneity of networks, user terminals and services. The paper begins with an overview on the trends in multimedia communications and outlines some major problems that current operations and management of multimedia networks are facing. Then, the authors propose an architectural design for autonomic communications aiming at enabling the networks and their elements to realize efficiency, immunity, resilience and evolvability through intrinsic self-governance. This Architecture of Network Autonomy (ANA) Model seeks to capture the synergy of proactive policy-based management and adaptive control theory. The third paper in this group BReliable Multimedia Transmission over Cognitive Radio Networks Using Fountain Codes[ by Harikeshwar Kushwaha, Yiping


Xing, R. Chandramouli, and Harry Heffes attempts to develop a new technique for distributed multimedia transmission over the secondary user network by making use of opportunistic spectrum access with the help of cognitive radios. Facilitated by cognitive radio technology, efficient secondary spectrum access can be designed to mitigate spectrum scarcity so as to improve total spectrum utilization. The authors propose the use of digital fountain codes to distribute the multimedia content over unused spectrum and to compensate for the loss incurred due to primary user interference. The research reveals an optimal number of sub-channels that result in maximum secondary user spectral efficiency for the same primary user traffic on all sub-channels and for fixed parameters of the digital fountain code. The final paper for this special issue is on the emerging applications of multimedia communication in home networking. Recent years have seen an explosive growth in the use of home networks. Ordinary and everyday appliances used at home will increasingly become integral components of these networks. They are required to join, leave and selfconfigure in accordance with their dynamic environment. New platforms and applications are needed to mediate interactions between devices to overcome the inherent problems, limitations and costs. The paper BManaging Distributed Networked Appliances in Home Networks[ by Madjid Merabti, Paul Fergus, Omar Abuelma’atti, Heather Yu, and Charlie Judice introduces some of the novel approaches that have been proposed to address the issue of device autoconfiguration and self-management using peer-to-peer technologies. A case study is also presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The guest editorial team would like to thank all authors for submitting their high quality work to this special issue, and to the numerous

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reviewers whose hard work and expert contributions are certainly the cornerstone to ensure the quality of this successful special issue. Finally, special thanks go to Jim Calder,

Managing Editor for the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE and Margery Meyer and Jo Sun, Publications Editors of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE for taking care of all the details during the entire

process in the development of this special issue journal. We wish you a very pleasant read of the high quality papers presented in this issue. h

A B O U T T H E G U E S T E DI T O R S Chang Wen Chen (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from University of Science and Technology of China in 1983, the M.S.E.E. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1986, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He has been a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, since January 2008. Previously, he was Allen S. Henry Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology, from July 2003 to December 2007, was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia from 1996 to 2003 and at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, from 1992 to 1996. From September 2000 to October 2002, he served as the Head of the Interactive Media Group at the David Sarnoff Research Laboratories, Princeton, NJ. He has also consulted with Kodak Research Labs, Microsoft Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Air Force Rome Laboratories. Dr. Chen is the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY (CSVT) since January 2006. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA from 2002 to 2005 and for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CSVT from 1997 to 2005. He was also on the Editorial Board of IEEE MULTIMEDIA MAGAZINE from 2003 to 2006 and was an Editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation from 2000 to 2005. He has been a Guest Editor for the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE (Special Issue on Distributed Multimedia Communications), a Guest Editor for IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS (Special Issue on Error-Resilient Image and Video Transmission), a Guest Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CSVT (Special Issue on wireless Video), a Guest Editor for the Journal of Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing (Special Issue on Multimedia over Mobile IP), a Guest Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communications (Special Issue on Recent Advances in Wireless Video), and a Guest Editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (Special Issue on Visual Communication in the Ubiquitous Era). He has also served in numerous technical program committees for IEEE and other international conferences. He was the Chair of the Technical Program Committee for ICME2006 held in Toronto, Canada. He was elected an IEEE Fellow for his contributions in digital image and video processing, analysis, and communications and an SPIE Fellow for his contributions in electronic imaging and visual communications. He has received research awards from NSF, NASA, Air Force, Army, DARPA, and the Whitaker Foundation. He also received the Sigma Xi Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring Award from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2003. Two of his Ph.D. students have received Best Paper Awards in visual communication and medical imaging, respectively.

Wenjun (Kevin) Zeng (Senior Member, IEEE) has been an Associate Professor with the Computer Science Department of University of Missouri, Columbia, MO since 2003. He received his B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University, China, the University of Notre Dame, and Princeton University, respectively, all in electrical engineering. His current research interests include multimedia communications and networking, content and network security, wireless multimedia, and distributed source and channel coding. Prior to joining Univ. of Missouri-Columbia in 2003, he had worked for PacketVideo Corporation, San Diego, CA, Sharp Labs of America, Camas, WA, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and Matsushita Information Technology Lab, Panasonic Technologies Inc., Princeton, NJ. He has also consulted with Microsoft Research, Huawei Technologies, and a couple of start-up companies. From 1998 to 2002, He was an active contributor to the MPEG4 Intellectual Property Management & Protection (IPMP) standard and the JPEG 2000 image coding standard, where four of his proposals were adopted. He has been awarded 12 patents. Dr. Zeng has served as a Steering Committee Member, Organizing Committee Member and Technical Program Committee Chair/Member for a large number of IEEE international conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, and is on the Editorial Board of IEEE MULTIMEDIA MAGAZINE. In the recent past, he has served as the TPC Chair for the 2007 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), the TPC vice-Chair for CCNC 2006, the TPC Co-Chair, Multimedia Communications and Home Networking Symposium, 2005 IEEE Inter. Conf. Communication. He was the Lead Guest Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia’s Special Issue on Streaming Media published in April 2004.

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Ralf Steinmetz (Fellow, IEEE) has been a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology as well as in the Department of Computer Science at the Tech¨ t Darmstadt, Germany, since nische Universtia 1996. He is in a chair position as the Managing Director of the Multimedia Communications Lab. From late 1996 until late 2001 he directed the Fraunhofer (former GMD) Integrated Publications and Information Institute IPSI. In 1999 he founded the Hessian Telemedia Technology Competence Center (httc e.V.) on whose board he has since served as chair. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the department as the Dean. He is an expert in the field of seamless multimedia communication. Seamless multimedia communication has the potential to create a future where people from all over the world are able to collaborate and communicate independently regardless of geographical constraints. His research interests cover quality of service (e.g. in network engineering, communication services and service oriented architec-

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tures), content distribution networks (e.g., peer-to-peer mechanism), context aware communications (e.g., ubiquitous computing and IP telephony), network dependability and security (e.g., of nodes and protocols for ad hoc networking), and knowledge media (e.g., semantic enrichment, networked gaming). At Darmstadt he often links these research issues very closely to mobility, e-finance, and telemedia learning. He is the author and co-author of more than 400 publications. He has edited and co-written a multimedia course which reflects the major issues of the first in-depth technical book on multimedia technology (updated in several versions). He has worked as an editor of various IEEE, ACM, and other journals. He has served as chair, vice-chair and a member of numerous program and steering committees of communications and multimedia workshops and conferences. He is a member of the GI and VDE-ITG. He was awarded as ICCC Governor, the honors of Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. In 2005 he became a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the BHessenAgentur[ and he was appointed as an advisor for information and communications technology by the Hessian local government.