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Intergrating DMIF and internet standard protocols for QoS-aware delivery of MPEG-4

University of British Columbia

Delivering high quality multimedia presentations over the Internet spurred the development of numerous encoding and delivery standards. MPEG-4 is the first true object-based multimedia standard that seeks to address the issues concerning the delivery of multimedia content over the Internet, in particular QoS-Internet. MPEG-4 defines a generic framework, Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework (DMIF), for this purpose. The DMIF standard, however, only describes the semantics of the delivery platform. Incorporation of the tools and protocols provided by the QoS-Internet into this framework remains an issue to be solved by system developers. This thesis presents a QoS-aware system architecture for MPEG-4 streaming over the QoSInternet. This novel architecture benefits from an object-based design that very well fits the requirements of MPEG-4 standard. This design addresses the shortcomings of the DMIF framework in providing a complete solution for the delivery of MPEG-4. Defining a practical syntax for DMIF semantics is one of the aspects of the presented design. Integrating the services that are available through existing transport protocols such as TCP, UDP and RTP forms another part of the presented design. MPEG-4 uses a very generic approach toward specifying QoS constraints and does not specify how QoS signalling methods are exploited in DMIF. Tackling QoS issues of MPEG-4 delivery forms an important part of this thesis. This part presents a method for integrating RSVP into DMIF, and proposes a QoS-aware streaming system design. To verify the validity of the proposed architecture and as a proof of concept for the DMIF standard, a version of the presented design has been implemented for the best-effort Internet. The implementation provides a complete realization of the proposed streaming system for best-effort Internet as well as a partial but functional realization for QoS-Internet. In addition to standard conformity, the implementation features a novel fast-start rate controller and multi-client support. This implementation of the DMIF instance for remote retrieval and MPEG-4 Streaming Server (also considered as the first open source code of this part of the DMIF standard) have become part of the IM1 software, the reference implementation of MPEG-4. This research work has also resulted in the publication of three papers in various prestigious conferences.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-08-14

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/12194

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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