Advances in multimedia communications

Recent advances in communications technologies have witnessed a growing and evolving multimedia content delivery market based on information gathering, manipulation, and dissemination. It is a fact that personal communications, computing, broadcasting, entertainment, etc. have turned into streams of multimedia content, and the various communication and network technologies have become the means to carry that content to a wide variety of terminals. Unlike traditional communication systems, a fundamental challenge for present and future communication systems is the ability to transport multimedia content over a variety of networks energy-efficiently at different channel conditions and bandwidth capacities with various requirements of quality-of-service. There are many issues need to be addressed such as signal processing, collaborations, power management, flexible delivery, specialization of new content, dynamic access, telecommunications, networking, etc., due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the applications in advanced multimedia communications.