UMA Enabled Environment for Mobile Media Using MPEG-21 Client and Server Technology

Usage of a multimedia framework becomes important when delivering rich multimedia content to mobile devices. The capabilities of these devices are very limited when compared to a desktop computers or laptops. Media resources delivered to these devices therefore has to be adapted. MPEG-21 introduces efficient tools to set up such a capability negotiation, where finally an adapted media resource is delivered to the consumer device. The idea is that the media provider knows all the capabilities of the terminal receiving the media resource. This way, no network or terminal resources are wasted, and session failures caused by missing codecs, too large spatial video resolution and other limitations in terminal capabilities are avoided. The tools developed in MPEG-21 are an important contribution to enable UMA (Universal Multimedia Access) in the rapid growing market for online exchange of rich media resources. This paper will demonstrate how MPEG-21 is used in an application delivering rich multimedia to a set of mobile devices.