Advanced Multimedia Management – Control Model and Content Adaptation

The delivery and the adaptation of multimedia content in distributed and heterogeneous environments require flexible control and management mechanisms in terminals and/or in control entities inside the network to enable terminal and application mobility. It is important to reach interoperability between the IETF approaches and the MPEG-21 DIA efforts for multimedia streaming and adaptation to cope with the aforementioned requirements. MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) provides normative descriptions for supporting the adaptation of multimedia content, but it does not define interactions with existing transport and control technologies, in order to remain independent of other technologies. On the other hand, the IETF standardization work on session descriptions (SDP and SDPng) provides the necessary transport and control mechanisms. By combining the MPEG-21 DIA and SDPng formats (both designed in XML), we create a converged model that enables the integration of session management and negotiation protocols (e.g., SIP or Megaco/H.248). This work presents a possible implementation of the SDPng and MPEG-21 DIA convergence as well as concepts and implementation of network-based content adaptation through media gateways that enable a flexible multimedia management for heterogeneous consumer terminals.