Thin Client Network Management with Distributed Source Coding

New services for wired and mobile user are offering an increasing amount of video content. Recent examples are news websites or video on mobile devices (such as mobile television). A second important evolution is the usage of the Internet protocol for fixed and mobile networks (Voice-over-IP or interactive digital television over the Internet). Finally, the use of portable terminals increases while still important shortcomings are occurring as it concerns channel quality of a wireless connection and processing power, storage capacity and battery power as it concerns the wireless terminal.
This project will focus on the source coding of video streams and the interaction with the network (management of the network and services). More specifically, itwill focus on thin client architectures for mobile users, where as much as possible tasks will be processed by the network and the accompanying servers instead of the mobile terminal. Thin clients have by definition limited resources and impose low complexity requirements (as well for encoding as for decoding). Technologies for scalable video coding are thus essential in this context. These codecs reach gradually a mature status so that they can be considered - in particular under heterogeneous transmission and consumption circumstances - to become full alternatives for their opponents. Despite the excellent rate-distortion characteristics of these coding technologies, two significant problems remain: 1) ensuring optimal rate-distortion behaviour under error prone transmission conditions and 2) the asymmetric complexity of the encoder and decoder (of high and low complexity respectively). This asymmetry is particularly incompatible with applications such as mobile videoconferencing, where minimizing the resource usage at the level of the thin client is of paramount importance.
The aim of this project is to develop a codec-network architecture providing solutions to the above problems.