Project SCALNET

Start date

One of the multi media market trends is TV anywhere, at any time. It means the ability to manage, store and distribute video content towards multiple kinds and scales of terminals, and over different and transient access technologies to reach the end user.

Today, in order to cope with these constraints, videos are encoded several times in different formats and bit rates. But this approach is expensive and not flexible:
– A lot of encoding and storage resources are needed
– Too much bandwidth is lost

New solutions are being developed for video encoding, such as MPEG4 SVC (Scalable Video Coding). They have been studied in order to optimize the bandwidth usage between the video head-end and the end users.
Due to the wide range of applications and options from the SVC encoding, studies like Scalim@ges have defined the right SVC profiles with regards to the fixed terminals (e.g. HDTV), and mobile terminals (e.g. DVB-H). Nevertheless, the current studies do not focus on the Networks aspects.
SCALNET proposes to focus on the impacts and needed adaptations on core, access and home networks, either wired or wireless, either fixed or mobile, in order to manage efficiently the SVC technology. SCALNET will also study the control interface between networks, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), CDN (Content Delivery Network) and video processing equipments.
SCALNET will address missing studies on SVC and will set up a test & demonstration laboratory, before the deployment of this technology, for the benefit of major key players in this area.