Multimedia Networking: From Theory to Practice

This authoritative guide is the first to provide a complete system design perspective based on existing international standards and state-of-the-art networking and infrastructure technologies, from theoretical analyses to practical design considerations. The four most critical components involved in a multimedia networking system - data compression, quality of service (QoS), communication protocols, and effective digital rights management - are intensively addressed. Many real-world commercial systems and prototypes are also introduced, as are software samples and integration examples, allowing readers to understand practical tradeoffs in the design of multimedia architectures, and get hands-on experience learning the methodologies and procedures. Balancing just the right amount of theory with practical design and integration knowledge, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in electrical engineering and computer science, and also for practitioners in the communications and networking industry. It can also be used as a textbook for specialized graduate-level courses on multimedia networking.

Jenq-Neng Hwang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. He has published over 200 technical papers and book chapters in the areas of image/video signal processing, computational neural networks, multimedia system integration and networking. A Fellow of the IEEE since 2001, Professor Hwang has given numerous tutorial and keynote speeches for various international conferences, as well as short courses in multimedia networking and machine learning at universities and research laboratories.