With the proliferation of multimedia capable devices, media services have to deal with heterogeneous environments where very different types of terminals wish to receive content anywhere and anytime. This situation motivates the appearance of multimedia services that adapt contents to the specific context of users. However, current Internet architecture is based on a rigid layered model which makes difficult to introduce new functionalities efficiently. To solve this, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) appear with the goal of proposing new architectures based on services that can be invoked when and where necessary. This work introduces how SOA paradigm can be applied to context-aware multimedia communications. In addition, a scoring function for selecting different service implementations is presented and particularized for a case of selecting transcoding functions taking into account different quality assessment metrics.

Peer Reviewed