Media-specific network service environment on federated autonomous distributed networks

Generally, multimedia applications´ time and space constraints lead to the requirement of functional services that support processing and communication of the multimedia data in distributed environment. The functional services, therefore, need to acquire media-specific meta-data from the distributed environment in order for end-to-end services with proper Quality of Service (QoS) specifications. In this context, it is pivotal that distributed multimedia applications become network-aware by gathering and utilizing meta-datasets from underlying network resources. Under these fundamental requirements, this paper presents a service environment that federates and manages the resource information of autonomous distributed networks (ADNs) in the perspective of media-specific meta-data provisioning for multimedia applications. We propose a virtual federated network (VFN) as a common federation interface between ADNs so that multimedia applications can be aware of the underlying network resource information associated with media-specific attributes.