MediaCloud: A New Paradigm of Multimedia Computing

Multimedia computing has attracted considerable attention with the rapid growth in the development and application of multimedia technology. Current studies have attempted to support the increasing resource consumption and computational overhead caused by multimedia computing. In this paper, we propose MediaCloud, a new multimedia computing paradigm that integrates the concept of cloud computing in handling multimedia applications and services effectively and efficiently. MediaCloud faces the following key challenges: heterogeneity, scalability, and multimedia Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. To address the challenges above, first, a layered architecture of MediaCloud, which can provide scalable multimedia services, is presented. Then, MediaCloud technologies by which users can access multimedia services from different terminals anytime and anywhere with QoS provisioning are introduced. Finally, MediaCloud implementation and applications are presented, and media retrieval and delivery are adopted as case studies to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed MediaCloud design.