UNIT V

Multimedia Network
Communications and
Applications

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Characteristics of Multimedia Data

• Multimedia network communication is same as computer
network communication because both are deal with data
communication. Multimedia data has the following
characteristics:
• Voluminous — they demand very high data rates, possibly dozens
or hundreds of Mbps.
• Real-time and interactive — they demand low delay and
synchronization between audio and video for “lip sync”. In
addition, applications such as video conferencing and interactive
multimedia also require two-way traffic.
• Sometimes bursty — data rates fluctuate drastically, e.g., no
traffic most of the time but burst to high volume in video-on-
demand.
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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications
Quality of Multimedia Data Transmission:
Quality of Service (QoS)
• Quality of Service (QoS) depends on many parameters:
• Data rate: a measure of transmission speed, often kilobits per second
(kbps) or megabit per second(Mbps).
• Latency (maximum frame/packet delay): maximum time needed from
transmission to reception, often measured in milliseconds (msec). EX.
In voice communication, when the round-trip delay exceeds 50 msec,
echo becomes a noticeable problem; when one-way delay is longer
than 250 msec, talker overlap will occur since each caller will talk
without knowing the other is also talking.
• Packet loss or error: a measure (in percentage) of error rate of the
packetized data transmission. Packets get lost or garbled or delivered
late over the internet. When it approaches 10%, it becomes
intolerable. Sometimes simple-error-recovery method used for real-
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time multimedia to replay the last packet.
Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications
Quality of Multimedia Data Transmission:
Quality of Service (QoS)
• Jitter (or delay jitter): a measure of smoothness of the audio/video
playback, related to the variance of frame/packet delays. A large
buffer (jitter buffer) can be hold enough frames to allow the frame
with longest delay to arrive, to reduce playback jitter. This increases
the latency and may not be desirable in real-time and interactive
applications.
• Sync skew: a measure of multimedia data synchronization, often
measured in milliseconds (msec). For a good lip synchronization,
the limit of sync skew is +/- 80 msec between audio and video. For
video with speaker and voice the limit of sync skew is +/- 120 msec
if video precedes voice and 20 msec if voice precedes video.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications
Quality of Multimedia Data Transmission:
Multimedia Service Classes
• Based on previous measures, multimedia services classified as
following:
• Real-Time (also Conversational): two-way traffic, low latency and
jitter, possibly with prioritized delivery, e.g., voice telephony and
video telephony.
• Priority Data: two-way traffic, low loss and low latency, with
prioritized delivery, e.g., E-commerce applications.
• Silver: moderate latency and jitter, strict ordering and sync. One-
way traffic, e.g., streaming video, or two-way traffic (also
Interactive), e.g., web surfing, Internet games.
• Best Effort (also Background): no real-time requirement, e.g.,
downloading or transferring large files (movies).
• Bronze: no guarantees for transmission. 5
Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Table 16.1: Requirement on Network Bandwidth / Bit-rate

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 Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Table 16.2: Tolerance of Latency and Jitter in Digital Audio and Video

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications
Quality of Multimedia Data Transmission:
Perceived QoS
• Although QoS is commonly measured by the above technical
parameters, QoS itself is a “collective effect of service
performances that determine the degree of satisfaction of
the user of that service”.
• In other words, it has everything to do with how the user
perceives it. For example, in real-time multimedia:
• Regularity is more important than latency (i.e., jitter and quality
fluctuation are more annoying than slightly longer waiting).
• Temporal correctness is more important than the sound and
picture quality (i.e., ordering and synchronization of audio and
video are of primary importance).
• Humans tend to focus on one subject at a time. User focus is
usually at the center of the screen, and it takes time to refocus 8
especially after a scene change.
Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Prioritized
Delivery
• Used to alleviate the perceived deterioration (high packet loss
or error rate) in network congestion.
• Prioritization for types of media: Transmission algorithms can
provide prioritized delivery to different media.
• Prioritization for uncompressed audio: PCM audio bitstreams
can be broken into groups of every nth sample.
• Prioritization for JPEG image: The different scans in Progressive
JPEG and different resolutions of the image in Hierarchical JPEG
can be given different priorities.
• Prioritization for compressed video: Set priorities to minimize
playback delay and jitter by giving highest priority to I-frames for
their reception, and lowest priority to B-frames.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP
• A broadcast message is sent to all nodes in the domain, a unicast
message is sent to only one node, and a multicast message is sent
to a set of specified nodes.
• IP-Multicast:
• Anonymous membership: the source host multicasts to one of the IP-
multicast addresses — doesn’t know who will receive.
• Potential problem: too many packets will be traveling and alive in the
network — use time-to-live (TTL) in each IP packet.
• Vital for applications such as mailing lists, group file transfer,
audio/video conferencing.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

• RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol)
• Designed for the transport of real-time data such as audio and
video streams:
• Primarily intended for multicast.
• Used in nv (network video) for MBone, Netscape LiveMedia,
Microsoft Netmeeting, and Intel Videophone.
• Usually runs on top of UDP which provides efficient (but
less reliable) connectionless datagram service:
• RTP must create its own timestamping and sequencing mechanisms
to ensure the ordering.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

• RTCP (Real Time Control Protocol)
• A companion protocol of RTP:
• Monitors QoS in providing feedback to the server (sender) and
conveys information about the participants of a multi-party
conference.
• Provides the necessary information for audio and video
synchronization.
• RTP and RTCP packets are sent to the same IP address (multicast
or unicast) but on different ports.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

• RSVP (Resource ReSerVation Protocol)
• Developed to guarantee desirable QoS, mostly for multicast
although also applicable to unicast.
• A general communication model supported by RSVP consists of m
senders and n receivers, possibly in various multicast groups (e.g. Fig.
16.1).
• The most important messages of RSVP:
• A Path message is initiated by the sender, and contains information
about the sender and the path (e.g., the previous RSVP hop).
• A Resv message is sent by a receiver that wishes to make a
reservation.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

•Main Challenges:

• There can be a large number of senders and receivers competing for the
limited network bandwidth.
• The receivers can be heterogeneous in demanding different contents with
different QoS.
• They can be dynamic by joining or quitting multicast groups at any time.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

• Fig. 16.1: A scenario of network resource reservation with RSVP.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

About the Example in Fig. 16.1

• Fig. 16.4 depicts a simple network with 2 senders (S1, S2),
three receivers (R1, R2, and R3) and 4 routers (A, B, C, D):
• In (a), Path messages are sent by both S1 and S2 along their paths
to R1, R2, and R3.
• In (b) and (c), R1 and R2 send out Resv messages to S1 and S2
respectively to make reservations for S1 and S2 resources. Note
that from C to A, two separate channels must be reserved
since R1 and R2 requested different data streams.
• In (d), R2 and R3 send out their Resv messages to S1 to make
additional requests. R3’s request was merged with R1’s previous
request at A and R2’s was merged with R1’s at C.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

• RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol): Streaming Audio and
Video:
• Audio and video data that are transmitted from a stored media
server to the client in a data stream that is almost instantly
decoded.
• RTSP Protocol: for communication between a client and a
stored media server (Fig. 16.2).
• Requesting presentation description: the client issues a DESCRIBE
request to the Stored Media Server to obtain the presentation
description — media types, frame rate, resolution, codec, etc.
• Session setup: the client issues a SETUP to inform the server of the
destination IP address, port number, protocols, TTL (for multicast).
• Requesting and receiving media: after receiving a PLAY, the server
started to transmit streaming audio/video data using RTP.
• Session closure: TEARDOWN closes the session.
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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

• Fig. 16.2: A possible scenario of RTSP operations. 18

Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Multimedia over IP (cont.)

• Internet Telephony : Main advantages of Internet telephony
over POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service):
• Uses packet-switching — network usage is much more efficient
(voice communication is bursty and VBR encoded).
• With the technologies of multicast or multipoint communication,
multi-party calls are not much more difficult than two-party calls.
• With advanced multimedia data compression techniques, various
degrees of QoS can be supported and dynamically adjusted
according to the network traffic.
• Good graphics user interfaces can be developed to show available
features and services, monitor call status and progress, etc.

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Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Transport of MPEG-4
• Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework (DMIF) in MPEG-4:
An interface between multimedia applications and their
transport. It supports:
• Remote interactive network access (IP, ATM, PSTN, ISDN, mobile).
• Broadcast media (cable or satellite).
• Local media on disks.
• A single application can run on different transport layers as long
as the right DMIF is instantiated.
• Fig. 16.3 shows the integration of delivery through three types
of
communication mediums.
• MPEG-4 over IP: MPEG-4 sessions can be carried over IP-based
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protocols such as RTP, RTSP, and HTTP.
Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

•Fig.16.3: DMIF — the multimedia content delivery integration

framework. 21
Multimedia Network Communications and
Applications

Media-on-Demand (MOD)
• Interactive TV (ITV) and Set-top Box (STB): ITV supports
activities such as:
• TV (basic, subscription, pay-per-view).
• Video-on-demand (VOD).
• Information services (news, weather, magazines, sports events,
etc.).
• Interactive entertainment (Internet games, etc.).
• E-commerce (on-line shopping, stock trading).
• Access to digital libraries and educational materials.
• The fundamental difference between ITV and conventional TV
is that ITV invites user interactions; hence need tow way
traffic (downstream and upstream) Also, ITV is rich in 22
information and multimedia content.