QoS Requirement in the Multimedia Transcoding Service Selection Process Abstract:

QoS guarantee is crucial for delivering real-time multimedia over any type of network. This paper proposes QoS-aware multimedia service selection in a heterogeneous network environment. The QoS-aware service selection is based on the nature inspired routing algorithm, AntNet. The performance evaluation for this selection algorithm is conducted on the multimedia content Transcoding system. This paper presents and evaluates a real implementation of an antinspired selection algorithm in the university network environment for choosing multimedia Transcoding services. From the test results, it is observed that an ant-inspired service selection algorithm outperforms the traditional shortest path selection algorithm in terms of Transcoding delay. In addition, we also compare the proposed algorithm with other algorithms through simulation, measure the performance, and find that the proposed algorithm achieves better QoS assurance.

Introduction:
Due to the emerging heterogeneity of client devices (e.g., personal digital assistants and smart phones), network connectivity, multimedia content formats, and QoS, there is a need for multimedia content transcoding. To have seamless access to multimedia content, it is essential to select and apply multimedia transcoding services to ensure that the delivered multimedia content is acceptable to the users according to a desired level of QoS. The multimedia transcoding service facilitates the conversion process by which multimedia content that is originally designed for a particular device, platform, or user is transformed to fit other devices, platforms, or users. The task of media content transcoding can be related to the coding format (e.g., MPEG and H.264), coding parameter (e.g., frame rate, bit, or spatial resolution), and/or personalization (e.g., based on the user or natural environment profile). Many available multimedia transcoding services provide similar functionality, but with different QoS, the challenge is to find the best way to select appropriate

transcoding services that fulfill the required QoS parameters. Thus, a service selection mechanism or algorithm is required to select the most suitable service. Solutions to the problem of service selection based on well as linear programming, dynamic programming, and known algorithms such and Dijkstra-based algorithms have been proposed, but they still have some limitations. Some of their limitations are complexity for runtime decisions and cost effectiveness. A genetic algorithm for service selection is also unsuitable for multimedia service selection because of the link failure, service unavailability, and topology changes often experienced in realtime multimedia service selection scenarios. The ant-inspired approach, on the other hand, is robust to topology changes and link failure, which makes it suitable for assuring QoS while selecting multimedia transcoding services in real time. We design an ant-based selection algorithm to solve the transcoding service selection problem in a scenario, where the number of transcoding services is distributed in several proxies over networks. The problem is to find the best transcoding path and services that maximize the QoS with the final delivered multimedia content without generating a considerable transcoding delay. To solve the problem, first, the traditional shortest-path-based selection algorithm for selecting transcoding services is used. Under dynamic traffic conditions, the performance of those algorithms in multimedia service selection may cause high user latency and delay. To reduce transcoding delay and control traffic, an ant-inspired service selection algorithm based on AntNet is proposed. The algorithm uses the same biological concept of stigmergy inspired by the shortestpath behavior of real ant colonies. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and incorporated into our multimedia transcoding system, where multimedia (e.g., video) is delivered to heterogeneous networks based on QoS. The QoS-aware selection algorithm is used to find the best services or path. After receiving the request from the server, the server generates a number of ants at a fixed interval. Those ants move through intermediary transcoding nodes (services) for desired transcoding services. On the way back to the source from the destination, it follows a transcoding path traversed by forward ants and updates QoS and pheromones. After arriving at the sender, the best transcoding path or service is selected based on the desired QoS. We measured the average delay (transcoding delay) and frame rate and compared the results with the traditional algorithm.

Finally, the implementation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional algorithm (e.g., Dijkstra based and dynamic programming) in finding the appropriate transcoding service in terms of delay. In addition to implementing the proposed solution, we also conducted performance measurements through simulation and found that the proposed selection approach achieves better performance in terms of success rate, QoS assurance, and runtime.