This page contains information about my M.Sc. Thesis in the MSc Programme in Information Technology, University of Stuttgart, Germany. My supervisor was Dipl. Inf. Detlef Bosau from the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems departrment. This thesis was started on December 1, 2001 and finished on May 31, 2002.

Overview

In the COMCAR project, distributed multimedia applications can be run on mobile terminals at different locations, e.g. a mobile terminal may have access to the Internet using 3^rd generation mobile networks, or the mobile terminal may have access to a campus LAN using WaveLAN or HiperLAN.

Adaptive applications, in order to be run, can be adapted depending on the mobile terminal’s location, its facilities and the network connection in use. One possibility of adaptation is the use of transcoding services for media stream when there is no common media format supported both, at the source and the sink of the stream, or none of the supported format matches the limitations of the available network connection. In the example below, a media stream is transcoded from a highly resource consuming format, Cinepak, to format which requires less resources, H.263.

Based upon Java, Jini and the Java Media Framework (JMF), in this thesis a service infrastructure for transcoding services is to be designed and prototypically implemented.

The service infrastructure is to provide:

• mechanisms to find and select transcoding services, which are appropriate for a given transcoding problem (service brokering).
• mechanisms to construct the service chain from the source through one or more transcoding services to the sink according the definitions provided by the application.

Presentation and Paper

• Final report in PDF format (715 KB)
• Presentation slides in Power Point format (238 KB)

Links

Standards

• RFC 791 - Internet Protocol (IP).
• RFC 761 - Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
• RFC 768 - User Datagram Protocol (UDP).
• RFC 1889 - Real-Time Protocol (RTP): A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications.
• RFC 1890 - RTP Profile for Audio and Video Conferences with Minimal Control.
• RFC 2326 - Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).

Papers

• Multimedia Web Services for Mobile Clients Using Quality Aware Transcoding (1999) (PS and PDF) - Surendar Chandra, Carla Schlatter Ellis, Amin Vahdat.
• Get a KISS - Communication Infrastructure for Streaming Services in a Heterogeneous Environment (1998) (gzipped PS) - K. Jonas, M. Kretschmer and J. Moedeker.
• Transcoding Internet Content For Heterogeneous Client Devices (1998) (PS and PDF) - John R. Smith, Rakesh Mohan, Chung-Sheng Li.
• An ActiveTranscoding Proxy to Support Mobile Web Access (1998) (PS and PDF)- Harini Bharadvaj, Anupam Joshi and Sansanee Auephanwiriyakul.
• Internet Telephony: Architecture and Protocols an IETF Perspective (1998) (PS and PDF) - Henning Schulzrinne, Jonathan Rosenberg.
• Adapting to Network and Client Variability via On-Demand Dynamic Distillation (1996) (PS and PDF) - Armando Fox.
• An Application Level Video Gateway (1995) (PS and PDF) - Elan Amir, Steven McCanne, Hui Zhang.

Related Research

• COMCAR - Communication and Mobility by Cellular Advanced Radio.
• ICEBERG - A project from University of California Berkeley which has purpose of any-to-any communcation.
• MASA - Mobility and Services Adaptation in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments.
• KISS - Communication Infrastructure for Streaming Services in heterogeneous environments.
• Transcoding of Video Streams - a project of Jun Xin, PhD student in the University of Washington.

Other Resources

• Java 2 Guide - links to many Java 2 SE resources, such as documentation, tutorial, etc.
• JMF Home Page - everything you need to know about JMF is here, including the download link, API documentation, tutorial, mailing list, etc.
• Jini Technology - all about Jini.
• IBM Transcoding Technology - Internet Transcoding for Universal Access from IBM Corp.
• A Review of Video Streaming over the Internet - describes various video streaming format, such as H.263, MJPEG, MPEG-1, etc.
• Audio File Formats FAQ - describes various audio file formats, such as G.723, DVI, GSM, MPEG, etc.