Introduction

In the recent times, there has been an enormous advance in packet-based networks (for example, the global Internet) technology. This gives rise to a high number of promising applications that would not have been possible without these great and rapid technological achievements. In addition, there have been advances in digital speech, audio, and video encoding (compression) methods. Compression is one of the most important features in current telecommunications technology. These factors have made it possible to transmit multimedia data over packet-based networks at low prices. In addition, efficient integration of voice, video, and data services in telecommunication networks is possible today. Among the endless number of applications, we can find videoconferencing, video streaming, video telephony, telemedicine, telepresence, video on demand, IP telephony, voice over IP, multi-party conferencing, Internet radio and broadcasting, multimedia storage and retrieving etc. This gives also rise to some important problems that have to be tackled. This Chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2.1, we provide the motivations behind the work presented in this thesis. The major contributions are summarized in Section 2.2. In Section 2.3, we give a brief overview and the organization of the report.