Motivation and Goals

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index and to Sandvine Global Internet Phenomena Reports, multimedia, in particular video for real-time entertainment, are the predominant sources of traffic on the current Internet and continue to grow. However, the Internet protocols and mechanisms have not at all been designed for the challenging real-time communication media like video and voice streaming and conferencing, such that ”the Internet only just works,” as Mark Handley put it. Intense research on Quality of Service (QoS) schemes and frameworks has been conducted over the past decades, not resulting in practical and widely accepted mechanisms in the IP networking world. Currently, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are the primary means to deliver massive amounts of real-time content, e.g., video streams, to clients in a satisfying manner.

Countering these problems and challenges, many Future Internet initiatives and projects have been and are being undertaken around the globe. Among them, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising approach, bringing content and efficient content distribution into focus. Several basic ICN concepts are quite similar to application-layer protocols in the IP world, e.g., a publish-subscribe approach in PSIRP/PURSUIT, pull-based data transport in CCN/NDN (interest/data packets) and in Adaptive HTTP Streaming approaches (request/response behavior).

Interestingly, though, the two communities, on Multimedia Systems/Communications and on Information-Centric Networking, have barely interacted. Multimedia communications researchers still mostly think and operate in the context of IP networks, while ICN researchers mainly discuss key networking aspects, not focusing on the requirements, challenges and opportunities of real-time multimedia data delivery/streaming (even though there are notable exceptions). Yet, recent intense discussions on the IRTF mailing list on video delivery and QoS/QoE and several publications (among them, an Internet Draft) indicate increased interest of ICN experts in multimedia communication.

The most important goal of this workshop is therefore to provide a forum that brings those two communities together, to spawn vivid discussions and intense exchange and learnings at the intersection of the two areas, and to help establish common terminology, work, and projects. The committees of the workshop are composed of leading members of both communities, in an attempt to solicit broad interest and good submissions to the workshop.

The workshop will emphasize video-on-demand (VoD) and voice/video conferencing (live) applications on ICNs, but other distributed multimedia applications are welcome, such as gaming. All aspects of media streaming in ICN will be addressed, including: basic principles and insights; protocols, mechanisms and policies (strategies) in ICN nodes; routing; measures and metrics for real-time behavior, QoS and QoE; evaluation methodology; prototype implementations, testbeds, and demos; and comparisons with IP-based systems. The workshop is open to discuss media streaming in all ICN approaches; comparisons of different ICN architectures are encouraged. Demos are welcome.