Advances in network-supported media delivery in next-generation mobile systems

This article presents new concepts for network-supported media delivery in mobile networks. Automatic composition and merging of networks are central parts of these concepts. Media delivery is no longer an end-to-end service that only uses the network as an IP transport. Instead, these concepts create a service-aware network and provide customized delivery support through per-service overlay networks. They also integrate specialized processing nodes as part of the delivery topology, which include transcoders but also more complex processors, such as localized program insertions or personalized spam control. This article describes the underlying concepts and how these new network capabilities for media delivery services are requested, invoked, and managed