Abstract: Existing and future media ecosystems need to cope with the ever-increasing heterogeneity of networks, devices, and user characteristics collectively referred to as (usage) context. The key to address this problem is media adaptation to various and dynamically changing contexts in order to provide a service quality that is regarded as satisfactory by the end user. The adaptation can be performed in many ways and at different locations, e.g., at the edge and within the network resulting in a substantial number of issues to be integrated within a media ecosystem. This paper describes research challenges, key innovations, target research outcomes, and achievements so far for edge and in-network media adaptation by introducing the concept of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) tunneling.

Abstract: The MPEG-21 standard defines a framework for the interoperable delivery and consumption of multimedia content. Within this framework the adaptation of content plays a vital role in order to support a variety of terminals and to overcome the limitations of the heterogeneous access networks. In most cases the multimedia content can be adapted by applying different adaptation operations that result in certain characteristics of the content. Therefore, an instance within the framework has to decide which adaptation operations have to be performed to achieve a satisfactory result. This process is known as adaptation decision-taking and makes extensive use of metadata describing the possible adaptation operations, the usage environment of the consumer, and constraints concerning the adaptation. Based on this metadata a mathematical optimization problem can be formulated and its solution yields the optimal parameters for the adaptation operations. However, the metadata is represented in XML resulting in a verbose and inefficient encoding. In this paper, an architecture for an Adaptation Decision-Taking Engine (ADTE) is introduced. The ADTE operates both on XML metadata and on metadata encoded with MPEG's Binary Format for Metadata (BiM) enabling an efficient metadata processing by separating the problem extraction from the actual optimization step. Furthermore, several optimization algorithms which are suitable for scalable multimedia formats are reviewed and extended where it was appropriate

2012
[2]	Michael Grafl, Christian Timmerer, Markus Waltl, George Xilouris, Nikolaos Zotos, Daniele Renzi, Stefano Battista, Alex Chernilov, Distributed Adaptation Decision-Taking Framework and Scalable Video Coding Tunneling for Edge and In-Network Media Adaptation, In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU 2012) (Evangelos Pallis, Vassilios Zacharopoulos, Anastasios Kourtis, eds.), IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, pp. 6, 2012. [bib] [doi] [pdf] [abstract] Abstract: Existing and future media ecosystems need to cope with the ever-increasing heterogeneity of networks, devices, and user characteristics collectively referred to as (usage) context. The key to address this problem is media adaptation to various and dynamically changing contexts in order to provide a service quality that is regarded as satisfactory by the end user. The adaptation can be performed in many ways and at different locations, e.g., at the edge and within the network resulting in a substantial number of issues to be integrated within a media ecosystem. This paper describes research challenges, key innovations, target research outcomes, and achievements so far for edge and in-network media adaptation by introducing the concept of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) tunneling.
2007
[1]	Ingo Kofler, Christian Timmerer, Andreas Hutter, Francesc Sanahuja, Efficient MPEG-21-based Adaptation Decision-Taking for Scalable Multimedia Content, In Proceedings of SPIE-IS&T Electronic Imaging Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference (MMCN) (Roger Zimmermann, Carsten Griwodz, eds.), SPIE, Bellingham, Washington, USA, pp. 65040J-1-65040J-8, 2007. [bib] [pdf] [abstract] Abstract: The MPEG-21 standard defines a framework for the interoperable delivery and consumption of multimedia content. Within this framework the adaptation of content plays a vital role in order to support a variety of terminals and to overcome the limitations of the heterogeneous access networks. In most cases the multimedia content can be adapted by applying different adaptation operations that result in certain characteristics of the content. Therefore, an instance within the framework has to decide which adaptation operations have to be performed to achieve a satisfactory result. This process is known as adaptation decision-taking and makes extensive use of metadata describing the possible adaptation operations, the usage environment of the consumer, and constraints concerning the adaptation. Based on this metadata a mathematical optimization problem can be formulated and its solution yields the optimal parameters for the adaptation operations. However, the metadata is represented in XML resulting in a verbose and inefficient encoding. In this paper, an architecture for an Adaptation Decision-Taking Engine (ADTE) is introduced. The ADTE operates both on XML metadata and on metadata encoded with MPEG's Binary Format for Metadata (BiM) enabling an efficient metadata processing by separating the problem extraction from the actual optimization step. Furthermore, several optimization algorithms which are suitable for scalable multimedia formats are reviewed and extended where it was appropriate