End-to-end quality aware optimization for multimedia clouds

This article presents a novel, end-to-end, quality-aware optimization framework for multimedia clouds, where path selection mechanisms are exploited in conjunction with media optimization in order to support multimedia delivery in a quality-aware manner. As wireless data traffic worldwide is characterized by exponential growth, with the most prominent part being multimedia services, consumers get in the challenging position to compete for the limited wireless network resources. Cloud technologies and especially Software-Defined Networking is the perfect candidate technology in order to provide an elastic, dynamic provisioning of network resources that adapt to a highly changing environment, where application requirements and data volumes vary over time. This work combines the selection of the optimum path in the core network with quality-aware media adaptation based on the current conditions of the wireless access network. Thus the proposed framework achieves efficient network resources utilization in an end-to-end fashion.