Resource management techniques for dynamic multimedia content adaptation in heterogeneous networks

Moving towards an explosion of wireless and wired technologies coupled with an evolution of wireless terminal devices and different types of services, there is a growing need to decouple the service provision from the platform support. This need is considerably significant if we consider the influx of multi-media streaming content, the number of devices with different requirements and capabilities, the different service platforms and the uncountable number of software programs needed to be downloaded in order to present and manipulate the desired content. The architecture described in this paper presents a model for nomadic multimedia environments aiming at providing an “on-the-fly” adaptation of the delivery system. Taking advantage of the innovative capabilities offered by the current reconfigurable devices (FPGAs), the intelligent agent-based service provision and the advanced simulation techniques, it allows a hardware-independent delivery of content, where the end-devices can be reconfigured to optimally represent the multimedia content. Specifically, this paper focuses on the Simulation Server module of the architecture, which provides a dynamic and efficient approach for the optimum adjustment of the communication profile and adoption of the reconfiguration strategy, according to the user/network combination and device capabilities.