The use of dynamically reconfigurable protocol stacks for streaming multimedia to mobile devices

Traditional protocol stacks can lead to a performance bottleneck due to the insufficient processing power and memory of portable devices. Micro-protocols attempt to eradicate this bottleneck by optimising the protocol stack to the functionality that is actually required by the application. Multicast media groups overcome the heterogeneous client problem where clients subscribe to different quality of services in accordance with resource availability and move between groups according to bandwidth availability. Chameleon is 100% Java middleware for multimedia streaming to heterogeneous mobile clients, which allows the dynamic configuration of protocols with respect to application requirements and available network resources. We evaluate the dynamic reconfigurability of the middleware in order to demonstrate runtime adaptation. We especially concentrate on the secondary quality transformation technique (SQT) of the middleware which enables clients to not only subscribe to media groups in accordance with available resources and network capacity but to also adapt media quality within each quality group dynamically in accordance to resource constraints.