EIMS paper @ EUMOB'08 and panel discussion

At this year's EUMOB'08¹⁾ I've presented a paper entitled "An Integrated Management Supervisor for End-to-End Management of Heterogeneous Contents, Networks, and Terminals enabling Quality of Service" on behalf of the ENTHRONE consortium. This approach is based on open standards (mostly MPEG-7/-21) which provides a interoperable solution to the UMA problem.
Additionally, I participated in a panel session related to "Mobile media delivery: research trends and emerging applications" chaired by Catherine Lamy-Bergot (THALES Communications) where we discussed the following questions:

• Multimedia applications in future mobile Internet: what content for what applications?
• Perceived Quality of Service for multimedia content over bandwidth constraint and error prone channels: is an objective criterion realistic?
• Cross-layer optimization: a buzz or a real breakthrough?
• Mobile media delivery: the new grail for telecommunication operators?
• The insertion of digital right management (DRM) tools in mobile delivery: yet another brake to activity or a futile struggle against pirates?

It seems that cross-layer optimizations are a big issue for huge companies who have structured their organization according to the ISO/OSI layer, i.e., different groups working on transport, network, or MAC layer issues. Well, this would require that companies have to re-structure themselves but that's what they always do, so what's the problem? ;-) Anyway, in this context I've been pointed to the eMobility platform which introduces the concept of the Mediation Bus, a module/layer/whatsoever that is between the application and networking layers (from transport downwards) but also interacts with all the layers and also allows for backwards compatibility. Is this the first step towards a single communication layer (below the application layer)?

Finally, I learned from today's keynote that gaming (incl. virtual worlds) content overtook cinema/movie content and, thus, gaming content will become the dominating type of content of the future Internet. This is a trend also recognized by MPEG which started standardization efforts for enabling information exchange between virtual worlds but also between virtual worlds and the real world.

¹⁾ Two year's ago at the first edition of EUMOB a colleague of mine presented a paper on behalf of a previous project.