An Adaptation Architecture of Multimedia Documents for
Management of the Quality of Service
Farida Bettou, Mahmoud Boufaida and Ilhem Labed
IRE laboratory, University Constantine 2, Constantine, Algeria
Keywords: Multimedia Document, Quality of Service (QoS), Adaptation, Architecture.
Abstract: The democratization of the means of wireless communication coupled with advanced technological
hardware can now offer portable devices that fit in the hand with a capacity of computation and means of
wireless communication such as mini PCs, PDAs, mobile phones and even wireless sensors. Distributed
multimedia applications are a challenge as they try to meet the constraints of the multimedia document, so
that the network provides no guarantee of quality of service (QoS). We propose to adapt multimedia
documents based on changes of context. In this paper, we present an architecture that aims at adapting
content and presentation of multimedia documents in the context of the user. We develop an adaptation
service cannot only detect and solve the problem of heterogeneity between incompatible components, but
also to manage the adaptation with preferences of the user. We propose to see the adaptation as a non-
functional property, provided by an administrator and handled by an adaptation manager QoS.
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the concept of multimedia presentation
has become increasingly widespread and used in
various fields such as education, advertising and
sales presentations.
A multimedia presentation system is an
integrated computer system, characterized by its
ability to process information expressed in several
media, such as audio, video, image, graphic, text,
etc. Their main function is to present media objects
synchronously according to a specified scenario.
Grace to developments in the field of
communication between computers, media objects
that are part of a single multimedia application can
be distributed on different servers, either on the
same site or on different sites. Because of its large
size and the vagaries of the flow digital connections,
access to an object can undergo a more or less
important and a random value.
Therefore, the quality of the presentation of these
objects can be degraded due to non temporal
deadlines. Another crucial point is the risk of loss of
data that a media object can undergo during remote
access and behavior of objects cope with this loss.
Thus, access protocols used to access media
objects must reflect the real-time nature and
behavior vis-à-vis the loss of data. In addition,
communication channels must provide the
bandwidth required to handle large volumes that
characterize these media objects.
To provide users of fixed or mobile terminals
personalized services, context sensitive and
adaptable infrastructure is required for the provision
of services designed for this purpose.
Adaptability is then defined as the ability of
media objects to meet the quality of service
rendered. Objects such as video clips and images can
be adaptable (according to the coding used) they
tolerate degradation in the quality of their
presentation (eg. reducing the number of colors
used) based on available system resources. The
multimedia communication needs services able to
face heterogeneity on several levels: the context, the
access devices, the communication network, the
user, etc. It is necessary to integrate capacities to
deal the heterogeneity problem, and to answer the
changes of the context caused by the user, the
application, the network or the access device. It is
necessary therefore to develop platforms capable of
ensuring the execution and the monitoring of
multimedia applications.
On the other hand, objects like text and sound are
most often not adaptable to the requirements of
quality of service they do not tolerate any loss of
content or data. Define the quality of service of
105
Bettou F., Boufaida M. and Labed I..
An Adaptation Architecture of Multimedia Documents for Management of the Quality of Service.
DOI: 10.5220/0004442501050110
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2013), pages 105-110
ISBN: 978-989-8565-61-7
Copyright
c
 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

component assembly is to define all the properties,
characteristics and performance of the service
provided to the customer and compared to the
expected service by the latter. (Dalmau et al., 2004).
Quality of service (QoS) defines the service
capabilities to operate in good conditions in terms of
availability, performance, etc. The researchers
propose different ways to group the QoS parameters
in different categories.
In the remainder of this article, we present in
Section 2 and 3, the adaptation of multimedia
documents and ensuring quality of service in
multimedia presentations, and then we propose a
model of software architecture for the presentation
of multimedia documents adaptable. We then
present the process of adapting multimedia
documents.
2 ADAPTATION OF DOCUMENT
MULTIMEDIA
A multimedia document is a combination of media
available to users. These documents are available on
the Web from a database and the user can interact
with a multimedia document through its interfaces.
The database must store specific structures and
generic documents. It should also provide the
context of media and stored in a database (Profile
Media). For each category of media, different
encoding formats exist (for ASCII text; jpeg, gif,
tiff, png, for images, MP3, Wave for audio, mpeg
and avi for videos).
Because of recent technological advances, users
have nowadays a great variety of new tools and
platforms that allow access to information anywhere
and anytime. Progresses in the means of access are
accompanied by a particularly striking change of
content. As the means of access to information is
very heterogeneous content servers cannot be sent in
the same way for all customers. There is therefore a
need to adapt content to meet the characteristics of
each customer target (Lemlouma, 2004).
Different contexts multimedia presentations
introduce multiple constraints on the presentation
itself.
Limitations of bandwidth between the client and
the server, for example, can lead the customer not to
play two videos at the same time, as well as the
limitations due to the display that can lead to similar
constraints (Laborie et al., 2005.).
An important criterion for a multimedia
environment is its ability to accept a variety of
formats and even offer some form of scalability so
as to take account of new formats.
Adaptation is a process (see Table 1) to change
the media type (transmoding), the encoding format
and / or media content (transcoding).
Table 1: Type of media and technical adaptation content.
category Transcoding Transmoding
Text
-format conversion
-font size reduction
- change of police, color
...etc.
-text-to-audio
transformation
Image
-data size reduction
-dimension reduction
-color depth reduction
Image to text
Video
-frame rate reduction
-spatial resolution
reduction
-temporal resolution
reduction
-video to image
transformation
-video to text
transformation
-video to audio
transformation
Audio
- change sampling
- format conversion
-audio to text
transformation
Other types of constraints can be introduced by
the user preferences, content protection and terminal
capabilities. Constraints imposed by the client are
called profile. Profiles can be expressed in terms of
restrictions on the language used to specify the
target documents or in terms of additional
constraints imposed on the objects.
For example, if the platform has a screen with
limited capacity, it will be not possible to present
two images simultaneously on the same screen
(Lemlouma and Layaïda, 2001), (Villard, 2001). To
satisfy these constraints, multimedia documents
must be adapted before being presented.
Several types of adaptation can be envisaged as
local adaptation (related to the different multimedia
objects) and global adaptation (related to the
organization of the content of the presentation).
From the profile and initial document, the step
adaptation should produce a document that meets the
constraints expressed in the profile. This adaptation
is usually performed by a program processing
document (Lemlouma and Layaïda, 2001); (Villard,
2001).
The adaptation of content is generally defined as
the process that transforms content from its initial
state to a final state in order to satisfy a set of
constraints (Lemlouma, 2004).
Indeed, researchers interested in this field
distinguish two types of adaptation:
 Adaptation of the logic service as the work
presented in (Marquet et al., 2002) and (Brain,
1999), where the service is represented by a set
of components. The adaptation is then to modify
the assembly of these components by adding,
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deleting or replacing a component.
 Adaptation of service content (Boszomenyi et al.,
2003); (Lemlouma, 2004). These are all forms of
adaptability choosing the change of content
provided by the service, depending on the
context.
A typical form of the adaptation of the content is to
change the encoding of a media stream, or a change
in the presentation of a service, according to the
context.
Figure 1: Architecture adaptation for a multimedia
document to user's context.
The abstraction of computer systems has led to
propose many languages, portable tools and abstract
to define paradigms of creating scenarios, that is to
say, the temporal relationships between elements of
the multimedia document.
The media industry has focused on the
effectiveness of storage and rendering information
monomedia, increase that is more felt in the parallel
computing power of computing platforms increased
rapidly.
In modern optical networking and multimedia
content distribution, scenarios have expanded
features associated with this release as service
quality, interactivity and dynamic adaptation to
network constraints. These multimedia systems have
in turn changed network protocols by incorporating
their concepts and techniques.
To ensure a good quality of service, the system
shall be capable of transmitting and transforming
complex multimedia content to be compatible with
the capabilities and preferences of the end user.
Guaranteed quality of service (QoS) is the ability
to provide and guarantee different priorities to
different users, different applications or to different
data streams in a communication system.
These priorities applied to data streams are
characterized by guarantees on flow, delay, jitter,
loss probability of data packets and bit error rate.
These guarantees quality of service make sense
when the transmission capacity of the system is
insufficient in relation to the entire flow of data to be
transmitted (Nivor, 2009). QoS is also related to the
hardware and software entities used for the
realization of an application. Indeed, it may reflect
the ability of these entities to provide a service with
different levels of quality, so in different ways.
In the case of distributed multimedia
applications, we can, for example, transmit a video
stream with different qualities depending on the
network bandwidth used (compressed stream, image
size, resolution, color or black and white) (Bouix,
2007).
3 ARCHITECTURE FOR THE
PROVISION OF ADAPTABLE
MULTIMEDIA
PRESENTATIONS
In this section, we present an architecture that can
handle the dynamic adaptation of multimedia
documents in the context of the user.
As shown in Figure 1, the provision and
adaptation of multimedia document constitute the
heart of the features offered by this architecture.
Four components are represented: the interface, the
multimedia document Manager, Quality of Service
(QoS) Manager and the Adaptation Manager
working together to find a consensus on the best
adaptation of multimedia document,
3.1 Interface
The component interface captures the context of the
user, and provides user interaction with the manager
of the multimedia document. It is used by a terminal
heterogeneous environment; it is a major player in
the architecture. This is the player that allows the
terminal to communicate with the rest of the system
to receive the content and present it to the user. The
user may at any time change the configuration using
the interface of the client application.
3.2 Multimedia Document Manager
This component intervenes in the process of
discovery and research of multimedia document. It
manages the coordination of the functions necessary
for a presentation of multimedia documents
customized and context sensitive. It provides access
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to content and communications that occur typically
between the client and the server. The multimedia
document manager receives requests from client
applications and server response content.
It also ensures the transmission of requests from
clients to servers in the same manner and server
responses to client applications. Often these
responses are adapted or modified before they are
delivered to their final destinations. Two databases
are associated with multimedia document Manager:
Media Profile and multimedia streams. The diversity
of the media and its characters and their various uses
suggest that what is needed more than before is to
define an abstract description to represent the
different types of the media. The media profile
contains information relating to each type of media,
such as available format, the possible passage
between the format and the types of the possible
adaptation.
3.3 Adaptation Manager
This component ensures the adaptation of document
content and it allows the identification of the best
scenario. This is accomplished through the
application of a set of processing methods and
structural content adaptation (see Table 1). The
adaptation is in most cases dynamic and depends on
the values that are the dimensions of context such as
the client application used, the formats accepted by
the client, the screen size of the terminal, etc.
3.4 Quality of Service Manager
It cooperates with other entities of the architecture in
order to make the best decision for adaptation. A
component must allow for a description of the
multimedia document adaptation in some cases, this
description is the document itself (eg SMIL
document). The supervisor of context user uses a
cache management to keep track of terminal
characteristics and changes they undergo. The
identification of these features (profiles) is based on
the IP address of the terminal.
To dynamically adapt to a multimedia user
context we use a QoS manager which allows a
manager to select the adaptation scenarios
multimedia document content requested by the user.
The QoS manager uses as input, the terminal
profile and the network profile, as it is present in the
user context. It also uses user preferences of media
for multimedia document, based on the information
captured by the Interface and transmitted by the
multimedia document; it also needs the context of
the media. Based on this information used as input,
it defines the list of possible scenarios. When the
user logs in via the appropriate interface, the latter
captures the user's context of explicit and implicit
and stores it in a database called (User Context),
which consists of three profiles:
 The user profile that is composed of static
characteristics (name, etc.), evolutionary
characteristics that are defined by the
environment (location, time, etc.) and
preferences (text, image or video);
 The terminal profile which has, firstly, the
context of the material (type of the device, the
screen size, etc.), and on the other hand, the
context of the software (operating system,
formats, etc.);
 The network profile that exposes information
about the network type, characteristics, etc.
To provide adequate adaptation interfaces, we used
the standard CC / PP (Composite Capabilities /
Preferences Profile) W3C (World Wide Web
Consortium). This standard is of great flexibility,
allowing us in the future to define our context
integrating physical disabilities of the users and the
specific needs of each application. CC/PP uses RDF,
one of the key specifications of the Semantic Web.
CC/PP is the first recommendation that is based on
RDF. The use of RDF for CC/PP has many
advantages: scalable vocabularies, decentralized
vocabularies, and simple integration of the interface
from different sources (Derdour et al., 2009).
To describe the description of our users, we used
the CC/PP with an extension to take on
consideration the physical characteristics of the user
and the objectives of transferring multimedia flows.
The descriptor is presented as follows:
[User_Profile]
|
+--ccpp:component-->[Terminal]
| |
| +--rdf:type----> [Plateforme_Materiel]
| +--display_Width--> ".........."
| +--display_Height--> "........."
| +--display_color--> "0/1"
| +--capacity memory--> "........."
| +--CPU speed--> "........MH"
| +--Connexion_supported--> [Types]
|
| +--Media_Accepted--> [Types]
|
+--Audio----->"0/1"
+--Vidéo----->"0/1"
+--Text----->"0/1"
+--Image----->"0/1"
|
+--ccpp:component-->[Logiciel_Used]
+--ccpp:component-->[Navigateur_Used]
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+--ccpp:component-->[physical_Used]
+--ccpp:component-->[Need_Media]
|
+--rdf: user_ preferences ---> [Types]
+--Audio----->{"0","1","2","3","4",}
+--Vidéo-----> {"0","1","2","3","4",}
+--Text----->{"0","1","2","3","4",}
+--Image----->{"0","1","2","3","4",}
+--rdf: quality----> "High / average/ bad"
The interaction between the user and the multimedia
document does not directly but by a multimedia
documents manager via an interface. When the user
starts interacting with multimedia documents,
multimedia document manager checks the
compatibility between the user's context and the
context of the Media. If the two are not compatible,
the multimedia document manager triggers the QoS
manager. It recovers media from multimedia
document manager, and from the supervisor the user
context to define scenarios.
The process of defining the scenario of a
multimedia document is complicated because the
object is to build a dynamic object whose behaviors
vary from one presentation to another due to
reactions to interactions of the reader. We have
proposed the use of a selection algorithm to choose
one of the plurality media content when the
multimedia content is to be adapted to the context of
a user and the characteristics of the device (Shahidi,
Ning, Hamid Aghvami, 2010).
4 ADAPTATION PROCESS OF
MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENT
A multimedia document is always described as an
assembly, according to a specified scenario, called
static traditional media (text, graphics), as well as
continuous media (animation, audio and video),
Structured Media (HTML, SMIL, SVG), and even
programs as applets or scripts. A good scenario is
characterized by a good combination of several
multimedia elements which can give a better result
for the presentation of information.
An adaptation cycle of the multimedia document
is initiated by a user sends a request to the
Multimedia document Manager, comprising a
reference to a multimedia document and a reference
to the context.
5 CONCLUSIONS
To run a multimedia document on multiple
platforms, it is necessary to adapt, that is to say, turn
what it is compatible with the characteristics of the
target device and the preferences of the target user.
This article deals with the provision of adaptive
multimedia documents, it is intended to propose an
architecture that allows users to discover and
implement context-sensitive multimedia
presentations. This paper presents an architecture
which adapts, based on a user context, multimedia
composites. These documents are tailored to the
preferences of the user, the terminal capabilities, the
location of the user, and finally to network resources
available.
In continuation of our work, we plan to
implement the selection algorithm scenarios. Note
that, for the moment, we do not support streaming:
the adaptation of multimedia documents must be
completed prior to delivery to the end user. The
streaming will be introduced later.
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