Intelligent and Pervasive Multimedia Systems

R ecent advances in pervasive computers, networks, telecommunication, and information technology, along with the proliferation of multimedia-capable mobile devices, such as laptops, portable media players, personal digital assistants, and cellular telephones, have stimulated the development of intelligent and pervasive multimedia applications. The new multimedia standards (for example, MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in increasingly effective ways, contributing to the multimedia revolution and having a significant impact across a wide spectrum of consumer, business, healthcare, education, and governmental domains. With the rapid increase in the penetration rate of pervasive multimedia services, coupled with the imminent deployment of 3G wireless infrastructure, users are more ready than ever to enjoy those services. What is really revolutionary here is that, we not only can enjoy these services in a passive way (for example, watching videos), but also can customize services by deciding what information we want to receive and how it’s delivered. The six articles selected for this special issue provide excellent coverage of the areas we’ve outlined, and deal with interactive multimedia education, quality of service (QoS) control in multimedia content delivery, multimedia service personalization, peer-to-peer multimedia streaming, mobile TV, and VoIP systems.