In-Network Adaptation of Video Streams Using Network Processors.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Multimedia Volume 2009, Article ID 905890, 20 pages doi:10.1155/2009/905890 Research Article In-Network Adaptation of Video Streams Using Network Processors Mohammad Shorfuzzaman, Rasit Eskicioglu, and Peter Graham Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2 Correspondence should be addressed to Mohammad Shorfuzzaman, szaman@cs.umanitoba.ca Received 23 October 2008; Revised 26 January 2009; Accepted 15 April 2009 Recommended by Yong Pei The increasing variety of networks and end systems, especially wireless devices, pose new challenges in communication support for, particularly, multicast-based collaborative applications. In traditional multicasting, the sender transmits video at the same rate and resolution to all receivers independent of their network characteristics, end system equipment, and users’ preferences about video quality and significance. Such an approach results in resources being wasted and may also result in some receivers having their quality expectations unsatisfied. This problem can be addressed, near the network edge, by applying dynamic, in-network adaptation (e.g., transcoding) of video streams to meet available connection bandwidth, machine characteristics, and client preferences. In this paper, we extrapolate from earlier work of Shorfuzzaman et al. 2006 in which we implemented and assessed an MPEG-1 transcoding system on the Intel IXP1200 network processor to consider the feasibility of in-network transcoding for other video formats and network processor architectures. The use of “on-the-fly” video adaptation near the edge of the network offers the promise of simpler support for a wide range of end devices with different display, and so forth, characteristics that ca