An active networking based service for media transcoding in multicast sessions

Active networking is one of the suggested technologies to introduce additional intelligence and programmability in the network and its services. In this paper, the use of active networking to support advanced multicast services providing media transcoding inside the network is investigated. In the multicast service different versions of the streamed data are made available and customers can select a specific version according to their wishes or their capabilities. Based on the active networking facilities of the underlying framework the different versions of the streamed data can be created inside the network, through transformations or transcodings of the original data. Both design and performance issues of the detailed service are discussed. A new multicast tree set-up protocol, taking into account the required transcodings, is introduced. A number of different strategies are discussed optimizing the location of the transcodings as well as the use of bandwidth in the network, while considering the availability of sufficient processing power in the nodes. The performance analysis is done for a voice stream multicast service, addressing the efficiency of the tree set-up strategies, the optimization of network resource utilization, the use of processing power for transcodings, and the resulting quality of streamed voice signals after multiple transcodings.