Multimedia Networking and Communication: Principles and Challenges

In case you haven’t noticed, multimedia communication over IP and wireless networks is exploding. Applications such as BitTorrent, used primarily for video downloads, now take up the lion’s share of all traffic on the Internet. Music file sharing, once on the legal cutting edge of massive copyright infringement on college campuses around the world, has moved into the mainstream with significant legal downloads of music and video to devices such as the iPod and numerous other portable media players. Multimedia podcasting to client computers and portable devices is a phenomenon exploding in its own right. Internet radio, pioneered in the late 1990s, is now being joined in a big way by peerto-peer television such as CoolStreaming and PPLive. Audio and video on demand over the Internet, also available since the late 1990s on the Web sites of well-funded organizations such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com, are now at the core of a multitude of new music and video businesses from Napster to iTunes to MTV’s Urge service, and will be expanding imminently to full-length movie delivery on demand. Moreover, Web sites such as YouTube have made publishing videos on demand available to anyone with a home video camera, which these days is nearly everyone with a mobile phone. Indeed, most mobile phones today can actively download and upload both photos and videos, sometimes in real time. Internet telephony is exploding, with popular applications such as Skype and others enabling wideband voice and video conferencing over the Internet. In general, voice over IP (VoIP) is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry, as circuit-switched equipment from PBX to long haul equipment is being replaced by soft IP switches. Enhanced television is also being delivered into the living room over IP networks by traditional telephone providers through DSL.