A QoS-based framework for distributed content adaptation

The tremendous growth of the Internet has introduced a number of interoperability problems for distributed multimedia applications. These problems are related to the heterogeneity of client devices, network connectivity, content formats, and user's preferences. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for transcoding multimedia streams. The proposed infrastructure takes into consideration the profile of communicating devices, network connectivity, exchanged content format, context description, and available customization services to find a chain of services that could be applied to adapt the content to the required needed format. Part of the framework is a QoS-based selection algorithm that finds the best sequence of adaptation services which can maximize users' satisfaction with the delivered content.