Multimedia cloud computing

Abstract

This article introduces the principal concepts of multimedia cloud computing and presents a novel framework. We address multimedia cloud computing from multimedia-aware cloud (media cloud) and cloud-aware multimedia (cloud media) perspectives. First, we present a multimedia-aware cloud, which addresses how a cloud can perform distributed multimedia processing and storage and provide quality of service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services. To achieve a high QoS for multimedia services, we propose a media-edge cloud (MEC) architecture, in which storage, central processing unit (CPU), and graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters are presented at the edge to provide distributed parallel processing and QoS adaptation for various types of devices. Then we present a cloudaware multimedia, which addresses how multimedia services and applications, such as storage and sharing, authoring and mashup, adaptation and delivery, and rendering and retrieval, can optimally utilize cloud-computing resources to achieve better quality of experience (QoE). The research directions and problems encountered are presented accordingly. © 2006 IEEE.