Self-organizing multimedia delivery

In this thesis the non-sequential delivery of media in dynamic networks is investigated. Consider a scenario where people participate at a social event. With the increased popularity of smart phones and tablet computers people produce more and more multimedia content. They share their content and consume it on popular web platforms. The production and the consumption of such media are, however, different from the typical sequential movie pattern: we call this non-sequential media access. If the infrastructure is not available, visitors cannot share their content with other visitors during the event. The idea is to connect the devices directly, which is further robust even if people move during the event (dynamic networks). Non-sequential media access in combination with dynamic networks brings new challenges for the whole multimedia life cycle. A formalism called Video Notation helps to define the single parts of the life cycle with a simple and short notation. New measures for transport are needed as well. A caching technique is introduced that allows for evaluating the goodness of content for being cached based on its popularity in different user groups. However, this cache does not cope with the dynamic network requirement, because such a delivery has to be robust, adaptive and scalable. Therefore, we concentrate on self-organizing algorithms that provide these characteristics. In this thesis the implemented algorithm is inspired by the endocrine system of higher mammals. A client can express its demands by creating hormones that will be released to the network. The corresponding resources are attracted by this hormone and travel towards a higher hormone concentration. This leads to a placement of content near to the users. Furthermore, the robustness and service quality is increased by placing replicas of the traveling content along the transport path. Unused replicas are automatically removed from the nodes, to ensure storage balancing. Finally, we show with a use case that a middleware based on the hormone-based delivery including well-defined interfaces to the user and to the network can be used for content delivery. For such a general application recommendations on possible configurations are made.