The result of decades of research and international project experience, Multimedia Communications and Networking provides authoritative insight into recent developments in multimedia, digital communications, and networking services and technologies. Supplying you with the required foundation in these areas, it illustrates the means that will allow for improved digital communications and networks. The book starts with a review of the fundamental concepts, requirements, and constraints in networks and telecommunications. It describes channel disturbances that can hinder system performance—including noise, attenuation, distortion, and interferences—and provides transmission techniques for mitigating these limitations. Analyzing both cable and wireless transmission mediums, the book describes the network protocol architecture concept and includes coverage of twisted pairs, coaxial and optical fiber cables, wireless propagation, satellite communications, and terrestrial microwave systems. Facilitating the understanding required to participate in the development of current and next generation networks and services, this comprehensive reference: Examines the range of network interconnections and WAN/MAN technologies, including synchronous optical networks (SONET), synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH), and third and next generation cellular systems (3G and 4G) Describes local area network (LAN) theory and technology, including data link layers and virtual LANs Explores network and transport layers, such as addressing, routing protocols, and IPv4 and IPv6 algorithms Covers TCP/IP services and applications Investigates different authentication and cryptographic systems, including digital signature, SSL, TLS, IPSEC, and public key infrastructure Walking you through the planning, design, and development of multimedia, telecommunications, and networking systems, the book provides a quick and easy way to develop and refine the skills required in the field. It clearly explains the principles and corresponding techniques you need to know to implement network security. The many examples and end-of-chapter questions also make it suitable for undergraduate and graduate-level computer science and electrical engineering courses.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) was conceived in 1996 as a signaling protocol for inviting users to multimedia conferences. With this development, the next big Internet revolution silently started. That was the revolution which would end up converting the Internet into a total communication system which would allow people to talk to each other, see each other, work collaboratively or send messages in real time. Internet telephony and, in general, Internet multimedia, is the new revolution today and SIP is the key protocol which allows this revolution to grow.The book explains, in tutorial fashion, the underlying technologies that enable real-time IP multimedia communication services in the Internet (voice, video, presence, instant messaging, online picture sharing, white-boarding, etc). Focus is on session initiation protocol (SIP) but also covers session description protocol (SDP), Real-time transport protocol (RTP), and message session relay protocol (MSRP). In addition, it will also touch on other application-related protocols and refer to the latest research work in IETF and 3GPP about these topics. (3GPP stands for "third-generation partnership project" which is a collaboration agreement between ETSI (Europe), ARIB/TTC (Japan), CCSA (China), ATIS (North America) and TTA (South Korea).) The book includes discussion of leading edge theory (which is key to really understanding the technology) accompanied by Java examples that illustrate the theoretical concepts. Throughout the book, in addition to the code snippets, the reader is guided to build a simple but functional IP soft-phone therefore demonstrating the theory with practical examples.This book covers IP multimedia from both a theoretical and practical point of view focusing on letting the reader understand the concepts and put them into practice using Java. It includes lots of drawings, protocol diagrams, UML sequence diagrams and code snippets that allow the reader to rapidly understand the concepts. - Focus on HOW multimedia communications over the Internet works to allow readers to really understand and implement the technology - Explains how SIP works, including many programming examples so the reader can understand abstract concepts like SIP dialogs, SIP transactions, etc. - It is not focused on just VoIP. It looks At a wide array of enhanced communication services related to SIP enabling the reader put this technology into practice. - Includes nearly 100 references to the latest standards and working group activities in the IETF, bringing the reader completely up to date. - Provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a basic, though functional, IP soft-phone allowing the reader to put concepts into practice. - For advanced readers, the book also explains how to build a SIP proxy and a SIP registrar to enhance one's expertise and marketability in this fast moving area.

The refereed proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on High Speed Networking and Multimedia Communication, HSNMC 2003, held in Estoril, Portugal in July 2003. The 57 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on integrated differentiated services, multicasting, peer-to-peer networking, quality of service, QoS, network and information management, WDM networks, mobile and wireless networks, video, CDMA, real time issues and protocols for IP networks, multimedia streaming, TCP performance, voice over IP, and traffic models.

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The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.

Excellent textbook of multimedia signal processing also dealing with the optimization of multimedia communication systems. It covers the theoretical background of one- and multidimensional signal processing, statistical analysis and modelling, coding and information theory as well as estimation and classification theory.

Multimedia data are used more and more widely in human being's life, e.g., videoconferencing, visual telephone, IPTV, etc. Nearly most of the applications need multimedia transmission techniques that send multimedia data from one side to another side and keep the properties of efficiency, robustness and security. Here, the efficiency denotes the time cost of transmission operations, the robustness denotes the ability to survive transmission errors or noises, and the security denotes the protection of the transmitted media content. Recently, various intelligent or innovative techniques are invented, which bring vast performance improvements to practical applications. For example, such content transmission techniques as p2p, sensor network and ad hoc network are constructed, which adaptively use the peers’ properties to improve the network’s resources. Multimedia adaptation techniques can adjust the multimedia data rate in order to compliant with the network’s bandwidth. Scalable encryption techniques can generate the data stream that can be correctly decrypted after bit rate conversion. Ubiquitous multimedia services make the user share any kind of content anywhere. The book includes fourteen chapters highlighting current concepts, issues and emerging technologies. Distinguished scholars from many prominent research institutions around the world contribute to the book. The book covers various aspects, including not only some fundamental knowledge and the latest key techniques, but also typical applications and open issues. For example, the covered topics include the present and future video coding standards, stereo and multiview coding techniques, free-viewpoint TV techniques, wireless broadcasting techniques, media streaming techniques, wireless media transmission techniques and systems, and User-Generated Content sharing.

In 1997, the two hottest topics in information technology are the Internet and mobile communications. Each one has the enthusiastic attention of the consuming public, investors. and the technical community. In a time of rapid expansion, they both face technical obstacles to meeting the public's high expectations. This situation stimulates a high volume of research in both areas. To bring the Internet into the twenty-first century. the research community focuses on multimedia communications in which integrated systems store, transport. and process many types of information simultaneously. A major challenge is to meet the of each information service. This problem is separate performance requirements especially challenging when a system has to deliver broadband, real-time services such as full-motion video. Meanwhile. the mobile communications research community continues its long term struggle against the triple challenge of mobility. ether. and energy. "Mobility" refers to the changing locations of terminals. When terminals are mobile. networks have to determine their locations and dynamically establish routes for information. The networks also have to rearrange themselves in order to maintain links to terminals with active communications sessions. "Ether" refers to the problems of wireless communications including limited bandwidth. rapidly changing radio propagation conditions. mutual interference of radio signals. and vulnerability of systems to eavesdropping and unauthorized access. "Energy" refers to the fact that portable information devices carry their own power sources. The rate at which the batteries of cellular telephones and portable computers drain their energy has a strong effect on their utility.