ABSTRACT
The delivery and adaptation of multimedia content in dis-tributed and
heterogeneous environments requires flexible control and management
mechanisms in terminals and in control entities inside the network. In
the near future, it is important to reach interoperability between the
IETF ap-proaches on multimedia session establishment and control and
the MPEG-21 efforts for multimedia streaming and adaptation to bring
advanced multimedia service provi-sioning and adaptation services
towards the customer. MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) provides
norma-tive descriptions for supporting adaptation of multimedia
content, but does not define interactions with transport and control
mechanisms. On the other hand, the IETF standardization efforts on
multimedia session control pro-vide the necessary transport (e.g. RTP)
and control mechanisms (SDP/SDPng). We thus bridge the gap be-tween
those approaches by creating a converged XML model that enables the
integration of session management and negotiation protocols (e.g. SIP
or Megaco) inspired by the XML formats of MPEG-21 DIA and SDPng. We
also present preliminary implementation results of the con-verged model
along with concepts and implementation of network-based content
adaptation mechanisms through media gateways that enable flexible
multimedia manage-ment for heterogeneous consumer terminals.

KEY WORDS
MPEG-21 DIA, SDP, SDPng, QoS, content adaptation, media gateways