Mobile Access to MPEG-7 Based Multimedia Services

Multimedia information systems have been developed into service-ware. With the paradigms of web services, service oriented architectures (SOA), and Web 2.0 widgets, multimedia has become truly ubiquitous. However, interoperability, scalability, reliability and security are arising challenges at mobile multimedia service development. This paper focuses on the analysis, design, development and evaluation of a middleware that allows access from mobile devices to a bundle of multimedia services. The services are based on the international multimedia metadata description standard MPEG-7. The implementation is based on new generation of service-oriented application servers called Lightweight Application Server (LAS). Mobile web services refer to the fact that mobile servers host web services. A prototype was developed as a proof of concept, showing how to access MPEG-7 based multimedia services from a Mobile Host and the analysis results of providing MPEG-7 based multimedia services in the form of web services from the Mobile Host to other mobile devices. An alternative solution is to apply enterprise service bus technology as the middleware. The performance evaluation results of both approaches show the reliable accessibility of MPEG-7 based multimedia services via the enterprise service bus solution.