End-to-End QoS through integrated management of content, networks and terminals: The ENTHRONE project

The ENTHRONE project proposes an integrated management solution that covers the entire audiovisual service distribution chain, including protected content handling, distribution across networks and reception at user terminals. The aim is not to unify or impose a strategy on each individual entity of the chain, but to harmonise their functionality, in order to support an end-to-end quality of service (QoS) architecture over heterogeneous networks, applied to a variety of audio-visual services that are delivered to various user terminals. To meet its objectives, the project is relying on an efficient, distributed and open management architecture for the end-to-end delivery chain. The MPEG-21 data model is used to provide the common support for implementing and managing the resources functionalities. Furthermore, the MPEG-21 framework implementation in the project will contribute to the realisation of universal multimedia access (UMA), which aims at achieving interoperable transparent access to multimedia resources from any type of client terminal or network and so, the rapid growing for online exchange of rich media resources.