A hybrid metaheuristic approach to optimize the content transmission in multimedia systems

The advent of the digital television in Brazil has allowed users to access interactive channels. Once interactive channels are available, the users are able to find multimedia content such as movies and breaking news programs, to send and/or receive emails, to access interactive applications and also other contents. In this context, a high demand of requests from users is expected. Therefore, from the content provider´s point of view, the determination of transmission parameters is needed in order to ensure the best quality of transmission to every user. The aforementioned identification problem is modelled as an optimization problem and a solution procedure based on metaheuristic techniques is proposed. Genetic Algorithm and Tabu Search metaheuristics are employed separately and coupled in a hybrid scheme to define the best transmission policy, optimizing the transmission parameters, such as audio and video transmission rates. Based on the experimental results, the hybrid algorithm has produced better solutions which meet the quality requirements.