Multi-Stream Management for Supporting Multi-Party 3D Tele-Immersive Environments

Three-dimensional tele-immersive (3DTI) environments have great potential to promote collaborative work among geographically distributed participants. However, extensive application of 3DTI environments is still hindered by the problems pertaining to scalability, manageability and reliance of special-purpose components. Most existing 3DTI systems either do not provide multi-party connectivity or require dedicated resources. Thus, one critical question is how to organize the acquisition, transmission and display of large volume realtime 3D visual data over commercially available computing and networking infrastructures so that “everybody” would be able to install and enjoy 3DTI environments for high quality tele-collaboration. In the thesis, we explore the design space from the angle of multi-stream Quality-ofService (QoS) management to support multi-party 3DTI communication. In 3DTI environments, multiple correlated 3D video streams are deployed to provide a comprehensive representation of the physical scene. Traditional QoS approach in 2D and single-stream scenario has become inadequate. On the other hand, the existence of multiple streams provides unique opportunity for QoS provisioning. Previous work mostly concentrated on compression and adaptation techniques on the per stream basis while ignoring the application layer semantics and the coordination required among streams. As the result of research, we propose an innovative cross-layer hierarchical and distributed multi-stream management middleware framework for QoS provisioning to fully enable multiparty 3DTI communication over general delivery infrastructure. The major contributions of our management framework are as follows. First, we introduce the view model for repre-