Delivery Infrastructure for Secure Scalable Coded Multimedia

The fast growing progress in data communication leads to a wide variety of available access technologies that provide everything from mobile data transfer to high-speed data links using fibre optics. Due to this fact multimedia contents, which have to be transmitted, have to be adapted every time the connection parameters are changing. Fortunately, modern video coding standards are able to deliver one multimedia signal in a scalable manner where various representations can be extracted to fit a wide range of applications. Commonly known standards such as MPEG-4 and H.264 are designed to provide a nearly perfect trade-off between quality and data rates. The other side of the coin is that none of these modern video-coding algorithms is implementing any security features that will prevent unauthorised access. Therefore, this paper will first briefly examine modern coding algorithms and techniques. Having finished analysis, a communication infrastructure set-up for improved multimedia delivery will be presented along with a cryptographic concept that prevents unauthorised access and perfectly fits into the system. Finally, a conclusion will be given.