The Mission
The Mobile Multimedia Systems (M³-Systems) Research Lab is a research institution directed by two Postdoc students of the Department of Information Technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt. The lab aims at applying the existing research results of the department in the area of distributed multimedia systems in the Carinthian industry, and to yield new results from oriented and applied research there. The research lab is the result of a "research-to-business" initiative of the Department of Information Technology and was founded in May 2004.
Since the beginning of 2000, ITEC's research activities have been focussed on adaptation of audiovisual content and distributed server techniques. The adaptation techniques aim at serving nearly optimal quality to various consumers under consideration of the terminal capabilities of their end devices, the current network conditions, as well as their know-how and interests in the presented topics. The adaptation of audiovisual content (especially of video streams) along the delivery chain from the server to the client has been treated in the context of the ADMITS (Adaptation in Distributed Multimedia IT-Systems) project. Since ITEC has been an active member of the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) for several years, standards conformity to MPEG-4 (the coding standard for audiovisual streams), to MPEG-7 (the standard to describe audiovisual content), and to the adaptation part (Digital Item Adaptation) of MPEG-21 (the multimedia framework) has been emphasized. The adaptation of audiovisual streams thereby has been reduced to wired networks. Finally, the major result of the ADMITS project was a tool kit, which implements a number of techniques for adaptation and streaming of MPEG-based video streams. The tool kit is provided as a shared library for multimedia applications like a streaming server, proxy server and media player. The tool kit was named ViTooKi and has been made available to the open source community via the Sourceforge.net platform.
The methods and techniques for adaptation of distributed server systems has been treated in the context of the ADMS (Adaptive Distributed Multimedia Streaming Server) project. ADMS is a highly flexible streaming server consisting of distributed services, whose number and distribution is dynamically adapted to given client demands and available network and server resources, to serve a large number of clients with nearly optimal quality. Thereby, ADMS relies on Vagabond2, a self developed middleware for adaptive distributed server applications.
The M³-Systems Research Lab aims at an economical exploitation of the scientific results from the two projects ADMITS and ADMS, in particular applications, as well as to do additional research especially in the area of video streaming in wireless networks. As illustrated in the following figure, the lab tries to develop the oriented and applied research by the means of concrete projects with partners from the industry.
