Special issue: Multimedia over mobile IP

The rapid advance in wireless communication and Internet has ushered in a new era of mobile/wireless multimedia applications and services. Tremendous growth opportunities lie ahead of us as academia, industry and government agencies make giant strides in the development of Multimedia Over Mobile IP. Apart from the marketing and economic impacts, the convergence of wireless communication, Internet, and multimedia is creating a new paradigm of research and development in order to deliver multimedia content over Internet and mobile wireless networks. With the benefit of increased bandwidth in such networks, newer and more powerful mobile devices, and continued effort towards standardization, wireless communication is quickly moving beyond voice and text-based emails into the reality of multimedia content delivery and access at anytime and from anywhere. In this Special Issue, we are extremely pleased to bring together a team of the leading experts from academia, industry and government agencies to provide an in-depth, comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving field of Multimedia Over Mobile IP. Mobile person to person speech communication has turned out to be extremely popular with more than one billion users at present. Today, mobile networks are evolving quickly to support multimedia communications. This Special Issue opens with a paper on the latest products and services for carrying Multimedia Over Mobile IP. The paper ‘Wireless meets multimedia’ by Jukka Yrjänäinen and Yrjö Neuvo provides an excellent overview of the wireless multimedia products and services in coming years. The access to various sources of multimedia will further enrich mobile communication; new mobile phones with graphical color displays and integrated cameras will provide a natural platform for large sets of multimedia applications; and open software architectures in these terminals are giving new possibilities to the developer community. Clearly, evolution of the mobile multimedia will create new challenges and exciting opportunities for related research and development activities. 3G has been a buzzword in the past couple of years. With the development of the 3G network infrastructure, emerging wireless communication standards and products, wireless multimedia applications and services are imminent and are poised to significantly change the way people live around the world. In their paper ‘3G wireless multimedia: technologies and practical issues’, Wenjun Zeng and Jiangtao Wen present an overview of the emerging wireless communication standards, end-to-end wireless streaming systems, and relevant wireless multimedia technologies. The paper highlights some of the challenges in the deployment of 3G wireless multimedia services, using an commercially available solution as an example. Video streaming is a highly demanding multimedia application for wireless channels. Bernd Girod, Mark Kalman, Yi Liang and Rui Zhang review recent advances in channel-adaptive video streaming in their paper ‘Advances in channel-adaptive video streaming’. Adaptive media playout at the client can be used to reduce receiver buffering and therefore average latency, and provide limited rate scalability. Rate-distortion optimized packet scheduling determines the best packet to send given the distortion reduction associated with sending that packet, interpacket dependencies, and the success of past transmissions. Channel-adaptive packet dependency control can greatly improve the error-robustness of streaming video and reduce or eliminate the need for packet retransmissions. Three architectures are considered for wireless video streaming, along with