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Project Info

Project Start Date: November 2004

Project End Date: October 2006

Grant by: UCY

Total Budget: €45.000

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Full Title: Adaptive Methods for the Transmission of Video Streams in Wireless Networks.

Duration: 24 months

Project Description:

The transfer of information through the Internet is becoming a promising business model. In addition, new Internet applications are emerging which require the transfer of multimedia content in real time (i.e. stored or streaming video and voice content). These applications, referred in this proposal as Real Time Multimedia (RTM) applications, differ from typical applications mainly with respect to their requirements in bandwidth and memory. In addition they set strict timing requirements since they demand a continuous flow of data towards the receiver once the decoding has started. This continuous periodic flow of data is creating a lot of demands in the network infrastructure linking the server and the client.
The latest developments of high bandwidth wireless technologies, such as the third generation (3G) of wireless cellular networks (i.e. UMTS) or Wireless LANs based on different versions of IEEE 802.11 (e.g. WiFi), in connection with the abundance of mobile devices with high processing power (laptops, PDAs and mobile phones), is making the study of the transmission of RTM applications (video or audio streams) over wireless networks even more interesting.
This work investigates techniques for the efficient support of video streams for wireless users connected to the Internet in the cases where the content server is at the wired part of the network. In such environments, the time-sensitive information is experiencing not only the problems created by congestion in the core network routers, but also the problems stemming from the nature of the wireless connection. Such problems include the high bit error rates, the dramatic variations of the available bandwidth, and the delay and delay variation due to the volatile characteristics of the wireless environment.
The proposed research focuses on:
(1) Network Adaptation Techniques (NAT) – the end-to-end adaptation of network parameters to the needs of the RTM application using algorithms which take into account the state/load of the network and the type of errors (congestion and flow rate control in wireless access network)
(2) Content Adaptive techniques (CAT) – adaptation of content to the desirable rate without the need for re-encoding or regenerating (transmission of information in multiple layers).
The proposed research is expected to enable a range of commercial, entertainment, and educational applications and actions which require the transmission of real-time multimedia over a wireless network.

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