An Autonomic Multimedia and Information Service Gateway for Mobile Devices

Abstract

With the increase of the networking functions of the mobile handheld devices, today there is a strong need for receiving multimedia through mobile handheld devices. However, the current streaming technologies cannot well satisfy the users' need due to the large network bandwidth requirement and high price. And the infrastructure of broadcasting oriented for a mobile handheld device, such as DVB-H, are not yet popular in the daily life.

Based on these considerations, a new multimedia and information service gateway is proposed, where novel multimedia and information services can be well provided to users with mobile devices. The gateway can connect DVB network, Internet, IPTV etc. media and content provisioning networks with the local area networks such as WLAN and LAN, as well as 3G cellular networks and WiMax which provide access to mobile and portable devices. The gateway aggregates media and Internet information and then distributes them via different access networks to mobile users. The most important feature of the gateway is that it has introduced the idea of the autonomic communications to solve the key problems for providing multimedia services like the video quality and the heterogeneity of mobile devices. Two control loops are designed in the gateway, based on which the autonomic source media transcoding and the dual-driven autonomic channel transcoding techniques are realized. Hence, the gateway system can adapt itself to the varying environments and can therefore provide better multimedia services to users.

In general, the gateway can realize the following functions:

• sending multimedia to individual mobile devices with suitable format, size, and resolution.

• multicasting multimedia to a group of mobile devices.

• broadcasting multimedia to the mobile devices in the local area.

• providing various information services to users through “push” or “pull.”

Especially, the gateway has the following three autonomic features:

• autonomic user management: i.e., it can obtain the users context information automatically and deal with users' subscription of the services.

• autonomic source media transcoding: i.e., it can adapt the format of the multimedia data received from the media provisioning network according to the capability of the receivers' devices.

• autonomic channel coding: i.e., it can adapt the coding parameters for the video transmission within WLAN by monitoring the status of the network and the receivers.

Simulation and test results show that the proposed service gateway can provide a new solution for multimedia and information service provisioning.

Keywords:

• Multimedia gateway DVB autonomic networking

The work is supported by (1) The National Natural Science Foundation Project (No. 60672086) (2) The Foundation for Western Returned Chinese Scholars, the Ministry of Education (3) NOKIA-BUPT Cooperation Project (4) The National 863 Program of China (No. 2007AA01Z2A1 and 2006AA01Z235).