INESC TEC concludes European project on multimedia contents
INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM) concluded in October the European project ALICANTE – Media Ecosystem Deployment Through Ubiquitous Content-Aware Network Environments, a project that provides a new concept for accessing multimedia content regardless of the location of the users, including direct transmission of content between users. The final audit of the project took place on 14 October 2013 at CNRS-LaBRI (project leader) in Bordeaux, France, and the evaluation team rated the project as "Good".
Starting in 2009, this project had three main objectives: provide the network layer with information on the content it carries, provide the service layer with information on the context of users, network and terminals, and finally make it possible to adapt services/content to improve the user experience on the Internet. Proposing a new architecture and the respective business model, the ALICANTE allows the user to access services and multimedia content efficiently, dynamically and transparently.
Under this project, the UTM team, composed of António Pinto, Tânia Calçada and Filipe Ribeiro, was responsible for implementing a hybrid multicast solution (native multicast, unicast, P2P) to support QoS (Quality of Service) and multi-domain trees.
Other than INESC TEC, other partners include: PT Inovação Portugal, Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (CNRS - LaBRI, project leader), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and RESONATE MP4 (RSN), all from France, the NCSR Demokritos – National Center for Scientific Research and the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, both from Greece, BandWD Ltd and Optibase Technologies Ltd, both from Israel, Thomson Video Networks (ThVN), the National Institute of Telecommunications (NIT) and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), all from Poland, the Universitaet Klagenfurt (UNI-KLU) from Germany, and finally the Universitatea Politehnica din Bucuresti from Romania.
The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and FEUP.