Multimedia Services Provision over Future Mobile Computing Systems

Guest Editors

George Mastorakis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
Evangelos Pallis, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece
Constandinos X. Mavromoustakis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Lei Shu, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China
Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, University of Beira Interior, Portugal

Main Theme

The provision of high quality multimedia services over future mobile computing systems (e.g. LTE Advanced, 5G) with increased demands for network resources, introduces new challenges in standardization activities for multimedia content quality evaluation and puts more pressure for further research on efficient delivery management mechanisms. In addition, the incredible evolution of mobile devices, capable to support multimedia based services and the recent advances on emerging mobile networks require further research efforts, towards investigating novel multimedia content processing techniques, scalability issues, as well as cross-layer optimization mechanisms for the efficient support of audio-visual services. On the other hand, mobile computing systems usually suffer from the rapidly changing network conditions, affecting the efficient provision of delay-sensitive multimedia content, while the mobile devices have significant limitations, in terms of high energy consumption issues and limited processing capabilities. Even if future mobile computing systems with improved bandwidth capabilities are adopted, the increased energy consumption and the fast battery drainage problems of the mobile devices still remain unsolved. Due to such limitations, multimedia based services over the current cellular networks are of lower resolution and quality, compared to the content provided over wired networks. In this framework, future mobile computing systems have to be context and content aware, dynamically adapting multimedia content, according to specific variations, configurations and specifications of mobile devices, as well as adopt energy-efficient schemes and algorithms. Despite the promising fact that multimedia services provision is feasible today by cellular networks, the above mentioned challenges still remain to be addressed, towards enabling for energy-efficient and ubiquitous delivery of high quality audio-visual content at any time. Within this context, and considering all the above mentioned issues, this Special Issue aims to present recent advances in multimedia services provision over energy-efficient mobile computing systems to alleviate associated problems and address related challenges. It welcomes papers that are dedicated on several research topics, related with multimedia services perspectives and emerging mobile computing systems, emphasizing on original research theoretical aspects, practical frameworks, developments and recent trends. System-level topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Efficient multimedia delivery over future mobile computing systems
• Peer-to-Peer services for efficient content delivery
• Content-centric and content-based networking
• Scalable video delivery
• Video quality assessment
• Novel media streaming techniques
• Metrics and models for Quality of Experience (QoE)
• Scalable digital multimedia techniques
• Architectures of multimedia content adaptation
• Quality of Experience (QoE) optimization
• Efficient multimedia delivery management in future mobile computing systems
• Novel compression and transmission techniques
• Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile devices
• Mobile cloud multimedia applications
• Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation in multimedia applications
• Energy conservation schemes for multimedia content provision over future mobile networks