Editorial: recent advances in communication networks and multimedia technologies

Abstract

To successfully support multimedia applications, it is necessary to improve the state-of-theart multimedia technologies and multimedia transmissions over communication networks in order to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees between end-users and to achieve a high quality-of-experience for end-users. The accepted papers in this special issue deal with a wide range of important aspects and challenging issues of communication networks and multimedia technologies, and the contents are built on analytical modelling, experimental and simulation studies. The contributions of these papers are outlined below. With the development of wireless access and multimedia compression technologies, much attention has been devoted to wireless video communications. Wan, Xiong and Yang propose an integrated routing metric to evaluate path quality taking the hop count, congestion bottleneck and other parameters of a path into account. They design the traffic assignment and traffic adjustment modules to make the routing scheme flexible to the changing environments, and present an enhanced link layer scheduling algorithm. Simulation results show that compared to commonly used schemes, the proposed network layer scheme always provides better performance with various traffic modes; combined with link layer scheduling algorithm, the performance could be further improved. High speed and quality multimedia and data transmission requirements exist widely in wireless networks. Wang et al. investigate the performance of opportunistic scheduling in wireless multimedia and data networks based on popular stochastic network calculus (SNC). The authors firstly bound the traffic arrival process using the exponentially bounded burstiness traffic model of SNC and establish a stochastic arrival curve, and then propose a new wireless opportunistic scheduling, i.e., modified proportional fairness (MPF) scheduling algorithm, which can provide better fairness for input traffic to guarantee QoS performance, and obtain a stochastic service curve. The numerical results show that the proposed stochastic model and MPF scheduling algorithm can provide better QoS performance. Multimed Tools Appl (2015) 74:1–3 DOI 10.1007/s11042-013-1647-x