Fast Adaptation Decision Taking for Cross-Modal Multimedia Content Adaptation

In order to enable transparent and convenient use of multimedia content across a wide range of networks and devices, content adaptation is an important issue within multimedia frameworks. The so called digital item adaptation (DIA) standard is one of the core concepts of the MPEG-21 framework that will support the adaptation of multimedia resources according to device capabilities, underlying network characteristics, and user preferences. Most multimedia adaptation engines for providing universal multimedia access (UMA) scale the content with respect to terminal capabilities and resource constraints. This paper focuses on the cross-modal adaptation decision taking process considering the user environment and terminal capabilities as well as resource limitations on the server, network, and client side. This approach represents a step toward increased universal multimedia experience (UME). Based on four different algorithms for solving this optimization process, we present an evaluation of results gained by running their implementations on different test networks