A Web Services Framework Supporting Multimedia Streaming

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "A Web Services Framework Supporting Multimedia Streaming"

By

Mr. Gibson Lam


Abstract

Multimedia systems are typically monolithic systems that are expensive and 
challenging to maintain and develop. With the advances of Service Oriented 
Architecture (SOA) a component-based approach can be applied to multimedia 
system development. A complex and large scale multimedia system can be 
split into smaller and reusable components. These components can be 
composed in different ways so that the development of the multimedia 
system can be flexible and the resulting component-based system is more 
maintainable, reliable and scalable than a monolithic system.

One of the common implementations of SOA is Web services. However the 
transfer of streaming data, which is a major part of multimedia systems, 
is not well supported by current Web services standards. To reap the 
benefits of the component-based approach for multimedia system 
development, this thesis proposes a novel multimedia streaming Web 
services framework which includes multimedia streaming support in the Web 
services domain. The proposed framework focuses on three issues: the 
discoverability of a multimedia Web service, the implementation of 
streaming data transfer between two Web service endpoints and the 
efficiency of the streaming data transfer.

First, the discoverability of a Web service relies on a standardized and 
descriptive metadata for its content. The proposed framework provides a 
query service so that the description of multimedia content input to and 
output from a multimedia Web service can be published via an extension of 
WSDL. Second, the proposed framework implements the streaming data 
transfer between two service endpoints using two new Message Exchange 
Patterns (MEPs) and their corresponding HTTP bindings. The implementations 
use MIME and Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) to 
transfer streaming multimedia as a stream of SOAP messages. Third, to 
reduce the transfer overhead introduced by the packaging method, this 
thesis investigated extensively the application of various compression 
schemes to the SOAP messages as well as to the packaging of the binary 
packet data. Experiments show that the proposed framework, coupled with 
the use of the binary XML encoding scheme, has a good performance for 
multimedia streaming transfer between two service endpoints.


Date:			Friday, 6 January 2012

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Tie-Zheng Qian (MATH)

Committee Members:	Prof. David Rossiter (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung
 			Prof. Wilfred Ng
 			Prof. Richard So (IELM)
                         Prof. Patrick Hung (Business & Inf. Tech.,
 					    Univ. of Ontario Inst. of Tech.)


**** ALL are Welcome ****