Written in an easy, conversational style, this is one of the first references to address concepts, architecture, and design of networked multimedia systems--giving equal treatment to both multimedia and networking. Using an abundance of examples and illustrations to explain concepts, it gives balanced treatment to all topics in designing systems.

In recent years rapid Internet growth has pushed the development of new multimedia applications in all aspects of life such as entertainment, communication, collaborative work and electronic commerce. Future applications will make use of different technologies like voice, data and video, but in order to make such a wide variety of multimedia applications successful, a number of technology and management issues must be addressed. Multimedia Networking: Technology, Management and Applications addresses the dynamic and efficient uses of resources ? a fundamental aspect of multimedia networks. Geared toward professionals, educators and students alike, this exciting new book will detail current research and the future direction of multimedia networking.

Covers all networking, multimedia applications and technology in one volume. Has a tutorial approach to the subject, complete with formal definitions, glossary (500 terms), 230 illustrations, a list of frequently asked questions, real world examples and analogies, and end-of-chapter summaries. Sophisticated technologies are explained in a rigorous but easy-to- understand way. Network managers and administrators handling private and public LANs or WANs, system designers, computer industry product developers, and multimedia IS managers.

Introduction to Multimedia Systems

Advances in multimedia communication systems have enhanced the need for improved video coding standards. Due to the inherent nature of video content, large bandwidths and reliable communication links are required to ensure a satisfactory level of quality experience; inspiring industry and research communities to concentrate their efforts in this emerging research area. Multimedia Networking and Coding covers widespread knowledge and research as well as innovative applications in multimedia communication systems. This book highlights recent techniques that can evolve into future multimedia communication systems, also showing experimental results from systems and applications.

This practical resource provides a survey on the technologies, protocols, and architectures that are widely used in practice to implement networked multimedia services. The book presents the background and basic concepts behind multimedia networking, and provides a detailed analysis of how multimedia services work, reviewing the diverse network protocols that are of common use to implement them. To guide the explanation of concepts, the book focuses on a representative set of networked multimedia services with proven success and high penetration in the telecommunication market, namely Internet telephony, Video-on-Demand (VoD), and live IP television (IPTV). Contents are presented following a stepwise approach, describing each network protocol in the context of a networked multimedia service and making appropriate references to the protocol as needed in the description of other multimedia services. This book also contains questions and exercises to provide the reader with insight on the practical application of the explained concepts. Additionally, a laboratory practice is included, based on open-source tools and software, to analyze the operation of an Internet telephony service from a practical perspective, as well as to deploy some of its fundamental components.

Multimedia Systems discusses the basic characteristics of multimedia operating systems, networking and communication, and multimedia middleware systems. The overall goal of the book is to provide a broad understanding of multimedia systems and applications in an integrated manner: a multimedia application and its user interface must be developed in an integrated fashion with underlying multimedia middleware, operating systems, networks, security, and multimedia devices. Fundamental characteristics of multimedia operating and distributed communication systems are presented, especially scheduling algorithms and other OS supporting approaches for multimedia applications with soft-real-time deadlines, multimedia file systems and servers with their decision algorithms for data placement, scheduling and buffer management, multimedia communication, transport, and streaming protocols, services with their error control, congestion control and other Quality of Service aware and adaptive algorithms, synchronization services with their skew control methods, and group communication with their group coordinating algorithms and other distributed services.