Challenges in Efficient Realtime Mobile Sharing

Abstract

Future applications are envisioned to be adaptive to various changes in network, environment and situation. These so-called pervasive applications will be composed from both locally and globally available multimedia resources such as audio and video, web services and context sources. The rapidly increasing pervasiveness in todays networks, i.e. the number of mobile devices, the amount of data they generate and share (near) realtime increases rapidly. In fact this forms the basis for research efforts on the Internet of Things. The increased pervasiveness leads to numerous efficiency and scalability challenges. This chapter will detail the state of the art and binding concepts for efficient realtime sharing and mobility of multimedia and context. Additionally, it lists the associated challenges and their progress in a number of research projects.In the past decade we have seen a number of technology boosts. Multimedia like audio and video moved from analogue to digital, enabling free audio/video calls over the Internet. Multiple network types have been integrated into mobile devices and bandwidth is gradually increasing. Sensors became wireless and form wireless sensor networks for environmental monitoring, and multiple sensors are added to mobile devices enabling different interaction modalities and situation awareness, The number of mobile devices and their capabilities are gradually increasing, and server clouds have been created that offer remote processing and storage.