Adapting multimedia Internet content for universal access

Abstract

Content delivery over the Internet needs to address both the multimedia nature of the content and the capabilities of the diverse client platforms the content is being delivered to. We present a system that adapts multimedia Web documents to optimally match the capabilities of the client device requesting it. This system has two key components:(1) A representation scheme called the InfoPyramid that provides a multi-modal, multi-resolution representation hierarchy for multimedia.(2) A customizer that selects the best content representation to meet the client capabilities while delivering the most value.We model the selection process as a resource allocation problem in a generalized rate-distortion framework. In this framework, we address the issue of both multiple media types in a Web document and multiple resource types at the client. We extend this framework to allow prioritization on the content items in a Web document. We illustrate our content adaptation technique with a web server that adapts multimedia news stories to clients as diverse as workstations, PDAs and cellular phones.

Fractal: A mobile code-based framework for dynamic application protocol adaptation

“…Odyssey [39], Rover [27] and InfoPyramid [36] are examples of systems that support end point adaptation. Conductor [60] and CANS [17] provide an application transparent adaptation framework that permits the introduction of arbitrary adaptors in the data path between applications and end services.…”

“…This is an obstacle for the wide acceptance of these approaches. Other proposals try to perform the end-to-end adaptation, like the static content-based adaptation [36,41], which does not take the mobility of users and dynamically changing environment into consideration. From the network OSI model's point of view, some of them work in the network layer [43], which adapts the TCP/IP protocol dynamically according to the changing situations on both ends.…”

Quality-Aware Replication of Multimedia Data

“…Quality adaptation in media delivery in response to heterogeneous client requests has attracted a lot of attention [2,6]. However, quality selection in static adaptation is not well addressed.…”

“…When a user query is received, the appropriate copy is retrieved from disk and sent to the user. Dynamic adaptation suffers from a very high CPU overhead for transcoding from one quality to another [5,6]. Therefore, real-time adaptation is difficult in a multi-user environment.…”

Transcoding proxy placement in en-route Web caching

“…Transcoding caching is attracting more and more attention since it plays an important role in the functionality of caching [3,10,15].…”