Abstract-In recent years there has been a trend for more user participation in Internet-based services leading to an explosion of user-generated, tailored and reviewed content and social networking-based applications. The next generation of applications will continue this trend and be more interactive and distributed, putting the users at the centre of a massively multi-participant communications environment. Furthermore, future networked media environments will be high-quality, multi-sensory, multi-viewpoint and multi-streamed, relying on HD and 3D video. These applications will place unprecedented demands on networks for high capacity, low-latency, and low-loss communication paths between unpredictable and arbitrarily large meshes of network endpoints. It would require operators to upgrade the capacity of their infrastructure by several orders of magnitude to ensure end-to-end quality of service. Instead, we advocate the development of intelligent cross-layer techniques that, on the one hand, will mobilise network and user resources to provide network capacity where it is needed, and, on the other hand, will ensure that the applications adapt themselves and the content they are conveying to available network resources, considering core network capacity as well as the heterogeneity of access network and end-device capabilities. This paper presents an architecture that enables this level of cooperation between the application providers, the users and the communications networks, so that the QoE of the application should be improved and the network traffic optimised.
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