Using the Grid paradigm for multimedia applications

Very popular mobile devices such as Cellular Phones, Laptops, Handheld and Tablet PC are becoming more and more powerful. One of today’s trends is to access multimedia services from this sort of devices. Their low capacity in terms of storage, and their high inclination to wireless connection, suggest to use streaming techniques instead of media download. Mobile devices are, at present, dramatically unhomogeneous for visualization and audio reproduction characteristics. Consequently, today multimedia delivery systems are very customized for some device profile or for wireless connection type. Transcoding techniques are used in order to adapt the same media source to the multiple hardware profiles. Client-based transcoding techniques show their weakness in energy consumption, and Server-based transcoding techniques suffer from scalability problems. In this paper we propose a scalable distributed multimedia server based on the Grid computing paradigm, which can adapt media content to the device profile and/or to the connection link.