MULTIMEDIA CLOUD SERVICES

Multimedia Cloud Services

[Name of the Institute]

Abstract

The aim of this research paper will be to introduce the principal concepts of multimedia cloud computing and present a novel framework. This paper will address multimedia cloud computing from multimedia-aware cloud (media cloud) and cloud-aware multimedia (cloud media) perspectives. First, this paper will present a multimedia-aware cloud, which addresses how a cloud can perform distributed multimedia processing and storage and provide quality of service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services.

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Discussion5

Background8

Research Methodology10

Conclusion10

References12

Annotated Bibliography14

Multimedia Cloud Services

Introduction

Cloud computing is an emerging technology aimed at providing various computing and storage services over the Internet. It generally incorporates infrastructure, platform, and software as services. Cloud service providers rent data-center hardware and software to deliver storage and computing services through the Internet. By using cloud computing, Internet users can receive services from a cloud as if they were employing a super computer. They can store their data in the cloud instead of on their own devices, making ubiquitous data access possible. They can run their applications on much more powerful cloud computing platforms with software deployed in the cloud, mitigating the users' burden of full software installation and continual upgrade on their local devices. (ARMBRUST 2010 50-58)

With the development of Web 2.0, Internet multimedia is emerging as a service. To provide rich media services, multimedia computing has emerged as a noteworthy technology to generate, edit, process, and search media contents, such as images, video, audio, graphics, and so on. For multimedia applications and services over the Internet and mobile wireless networks, there are strong demands for cloud computing because of the significant amount of computation required for serving millions of Internet or mobile users at the same time. (Holschuh 2010 36-37)

In this new cloud-based multimedia-computing paradigm, users store and process their multimedia application data in the cloud in a distributed manner, eliminating full installation of the media application software on the users' computer or device and thus alleviating the burden of multimedia software maintenance and upgrade as well as sparing the computation of user devices and saving the battery of mobile phones. (Wang 2010 137-146 )

Discussion

Multimedia processing in a cloud imposes great challenges. Several fundamental challenges for multimedia computing in the cloud are highlighted as follows.

Multimedia and service heterogeneity: As there exist different types of multimedia and services, such as voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, photo sharing and editing, multimedia streaming, image search, image-based rendering, video transcoding and adaptation, and multimedia content delivery, the cloud shall support different types of multimedia and multimedia services for millions of users simultaneously.

QoS heterogeneity: As different multimedia services have different QoS requirements, the cloud shall provide QoS provisioning and support for various types of multimedia services to meet different multimedia QoS requirements.

Network heterogeneity: As different networks, such as Internet, wireless local area network (LAN), and third generation wireless network, have different network characteristics, such as bandwidth, delay, and jitter, the cloud shall adapt multimedia contents for optimal delivery to various types of devices with ...