Introduction to Special Issue on Multimedia Big Data

Multimedia, the biggest big data—including game media, social images, voices and videos, medical images, to name just a few—continue to outstrip the capacity of the traditional multimedia processing and analysis systems. To tackle this issue, researchers developed and presented many technologies and applications to connect big data to multimedia processing, which plays an important role in existing multimedia computing. Further, in real-time scenarios, such as cloud game systems, which have a strict delay limitation in interaction, multimedia data processing needs much higher performance networking support. However, networking for multimedia big data processing, communications, and applications has attracted less attention so far. Even though the size of multimedia big data has increased rapidly in recent years, it is difficult for fundamental networking technologies to handle the requirements of progressively complex processing and analysis. New networking technology also brings a new possibility of multimedia systems, for example, processing and analyzing increasing amounts of multimedia data generated by smartphones in developing mobile networks has become a very important field in multimedia big data computing. Therefore, since networking plays an essential role in multimedia big data computing, there is a critical need for research into a new concept: designs and implementation that can support more reliable , efficient and real-time multimedia big data computing, communications, and applications. This special issue of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications (TOMM) provides an opportunity to attract and bring together network architecture, video game system, multimedia streaming, distributed systems, and multimedia computing researchers along with big data and networking researchers with diverse backgrounds to contribute articles on theoretical, practical, and methodological issues for next-generation networks for multimedia big data computing and communications. There are twenty-six submissions for this special issue of ACM TOMM. Seven high-quality, creative, and interesting articles were selected and accepted, which discuss various challenges and emerging directions in networking for multimedia big data. This special issue starts off with four articles concerning management and optimization for better performance and efficiency of multimedia big data computing in cloud data center networks. The first article by Amiri et al. is titled " Towards Delay-Efficient Game-Aware Data Centers for Cloud Gaming. " It presents a novel method for improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) within a cloud gaming data center, as well as a novel optimization-based method for near-optimally assigning game servers to gaming sessions and selecting the best communication path with a cloud gaming data …