Delivering audiovisual content with MPEG-21-enabled cross-layer QoS adaptation

Future multimedia communication systems have to support the user's needs, the terminal capabilities, the content specification and the underlying networking technologies. The related protocols and applications must be designed from this integration perspective in a cross-layer centric manner. We propose an implementation of a streaming service (e.g., Television over IP service) with a unified QoS management concept that enables an IP driven integration of different system components (terminal, user, content, and network). The MPEG-21 framework is used to provide a common support for implementing and managing the end-to-end QoS. The main focus of this paper is on the architecture design, protocols specification and implementation evaluation. Performance evaluations using PSNR and SSIM objective video quality metrics show the benefit of the proposed MPEG-21-enabled cross-layer adaptation.