Motivation

As the leading Study Group on multimedia applications, terminals and systems, including ubiquitous applications, SG 16 continues to make advances in multimedia communication and has been successfully in producing numerous Recommendations which address topical areas such as multimedia terminal design, home networking, multimedia architecture, audiovisual communications, multimedia conferencing, media coding, multimedia content, multimedia service description, etc.

For all these multimedia service systems, there might be some extra multimedia functions deployed to improve service delivery and service implementation, such as quality of service (QoS) guarantee, service usability and efficiency, security and so on. These functions normally are not fundamental components of the multimedia service/application and are sometimes independent of a particular multimedia system. Therefore, these functions could be provided by comparatively common entities or stand-alone systems.

Deep-packet inspection (DPI) is one of this kind of functions. DPI can inspect the packet/flow and then identify service/applications types to make identification, control and statistics for the various applications possible, to guarantee bandwidth consuming efficiency or quality of experience (QoE) of the subscribed services, and so on. Another case is a network-based multimedia delivery function, which can be used to accelerate media distribution by delivering media flow more efficiently e.g. for IPTV, visual surveillance, and e-learning. Multimedia NAT control and firewall traversal function is also considered in the scope of this kind of functions.

With the current continuous growing of multimedia services and the diversification of the users’ demands, the multimedia functions mentioned above become more and more important to improve service quality and assist multimedia service deployment. In the future, more similar multimedia functions are expected to be used both in the NGN environment and in other networks, hence this Question will focus on the study of the various multimedia functions to guarantee multimedia service implementation.

Study items

Study items to be considered include, but are not limited to:

• Network-based multimedia delivery function deployed in the network: to distribute, cache, store and deliver the content. They handle the media control messages for controlling media flows.
• Multimedia inspection function: to identify service/application types.
• Multimedia discovery and selection function: to advertise complex descriptions of available or already running services, while customers use this function to compose complex queries for locating a particular network service or service provider out of hundreds of thousands of accessible services and service providers.
• Context awareness adaptation: multimedia service system is required to be aware of and adapt to frequent changes in the environment, such as variable bandwidth, transport delay, device capability and instability etc when the user accesses the system from different sites/statuses.
• Transcoding: to convert video and audio codec between different formats (in coordination with the media coding Questions)
• Multimedia location function: to support multimedia service which can provide location information of the user or use this kind of information for enhanced user experience
• Multimedia traceability function: to collect information of location change to allow individual routing, and information of distribution site identifications
• Legacy service emulation/simulation: to realize traditional service capabilities in IP networks so that a user can have the identical experience as provided by traditional services
• Other multimedia functions in NGN and other networks
• Considerations on how to help measure and mitigate climate change

The functions to be studied in this Question are intended to be service-agnostic. For different service systems, some customized study may be needed to account for the different specific context. If some function has been studied deeply and this Question cannot cover it, a new Question may be created to address all the aspects for that function.

Tasks

Tasks include, but are not limited to:

• Requirements of some functions
• Develop architecture specifications, such as the inspection technology, inspection policy, delivery function, network topologies, robustness etc (1Q 2009)
• Detailed development of some functions
• Other new multimedia functions (2010+)

An up-to-date status of work under this Question is found in the SG 16 work programme (http://itu.int/ITU-T/workprog/wp_search.aspx?isn_sg=554).

Relationships

Recommendations:

• F, G, H, I, Q, T, V, X, Y series Recommendations under the responsibility of SG 16

Questions:

• 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 21, 22/16

Study Groups:

• ITU-T SGs 11 and 13, for NGN, IPTV and other matters
• ITU-T SGs dealing with IPTV

Other Bodies:

• 3GPP and related consortia
• IETF