Method, apparatus, and medium for providing multimedia service considering terminal capability

• US 20050226196A1
• Filed: 04/11/2005
• Published: 10/13/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 04/12/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Industry academic Cooperation Foundation Keimyung University, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Samsung Group)
• Original Assignee: Industry academic Cooperation Foundation Keimyung University, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Samsung Group)
• Inventors: Suh, Doug-Young
• Granted Patent: US 7,808,900 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/338
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1101 Session protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1106 Call signalling protocols; H.323 and related
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/80 Responding to QoS
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/04 specially adapted for terminals or networks with limited capabilities; specially adapted for terminal portability
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/12 specially adapted for proprietary or special-purpose networking environments, e.g. medical networks, sensor networks, networks in vehicles or remote metering networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/303 Terminal profiles
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/52 specially adapted for the location of the user terminal
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/61 taking into account QoS or priority requirements
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/24 Negotiation of communication capabilities
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/329 in the application layer [OSI layer 7]
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/25808 Management of client data terminal profiles in network data switching protocols H04L67/303
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2662 Controlling the complexity of the video stream, e.g. by scaling the resolution or bitrate of the video stream based on the client capabilities
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/41422 located in transportation means, e.g. personal vehicle arrangements specially adapted for transportation systems in broadcast systems H04H20/62
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/42202 environmental sensors, e.g. for detecting temperature, luminosity, pressure, earthquakes
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/44012 involving rendering scenes according to scene graphs, e.g. MPEG-4 scene graphs
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/44209 Monitoring of downstream path of the transmission network originating from a server, e.g. bandwidth variations of a wireless network arrangements for maintenance or administration in data switching networks involving bandwidth and capacity management H04L41/0896
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4424 Monitoring of the internal components or processes of the client device, e.g. CPU or memory load, processing speed, timer, counter or percentage of the hard disk space used error monitoring in general G06F11/30; arrangements for monitoring conditions of receiving stations in broadcast systems H04H60/32; diagnosis, testing or measuring for television receivers H04N17/04
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/6582 Data stored in the client, e.g. viewing habits, hardware capabilities, credit card number arrangements where receivers interact with the broadcast H04H20/38
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/02 Services making use of location information
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/029 : Location-based management or tracking services

Abstract

A method of providing multimedia services in consideration of the capability of a terminal, a method of receiving the multimedia services, and a terminal for receiving the multimedia services. The method of providing multimedia services includes receiving information regarding capability of a terminal, and processing data according to the received information and providing the processed data to the terminal. Accordingly, it is possible to provide the server or proxy server with information regarding resources available for a lightweight application terminal, allowing it to provide data at a level of quality best suited to the capabilities of the terminal.

Claims

1. A method of providing multimedia services, comprising:

obtaining information regarding capability of a terminal;

processing data according to the obtained information; and

providing the processed data to the terminal.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein said obtaining information regarding capability of the terminal comprises:

querying the capability of the terminal;

obtaining the information regarding the capability of the terminal using at least one sensor; and

quantizing the obtained information.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the information regarding the capability of the terminal comprises:

information including acceleration and location of a vehicle, which are provided via an intra vehicle network; and

information including strength and available bitrate of a signal providing the information.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the information including the location of the vehicle is obtained by measuring the distance between the terminal and either a base station or an access point.

5. The method of claim 3, wherein the acceleration of the vehicle is determined by measuring the linear distance between the terminal and either a base station or an access point.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said processing data according to the obtained information further includes changing a quality of service of the data according to the obtained information.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the quality of service is related to the bit rate of the signal transmitted, the size of video frames, and the number of frames per second.

8. The method of claim 6, wherein said processing data according to the obtained information further includes performing media filtering to prevent the transmission of particular data according to the obtained information, which prevents either video data or audio data from being provided to the terminal.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein:

the information further includes a scene;

said processing data according to the obtained information further includes changing a quality of service of the data; and

the information regarding the scene, the quality of service of the data of which is changed, is described in a language that describes virtual temporal and spatial layout of encoded objects.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the language has a binary format for the scene in which the construction of the scene using binary data is described in a compressed manner and a substantial linkage relation among media streams is defined using an object descriptor.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the binary format for the scene uses the object descriptor describing reproduction times, locations, and sizes of the respective media objects, and allows the object descriptor to be modified when a change in quality of multimedia data changes the size of the multimedia data or an object is added or removed from the media objects.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the information regarding the capability of the terminal is included in a receiver report packet of a real-time control protocol and transmitted to the terminal.

13. A method of receiving multimedia services, comprising:

transmitting information including capability of a terminal;

processing data according to the transmitted information; and

receiving data processed according to the transmitted information.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein said transmitting information including capability of the terminal comprises:

querying the capability of the terminal;

obtaining the information using at least one sensor;

quantizing the information; and

transmitting the quantized information.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the information including the capability of the terminal comprises:

information including acceleration and location of a vehicle, which are provided via an intra vehicle network; and

information including the strength and available bitrate of a signal providing the information.

16. The method of claim 13, wherein said processing data according to the transmitted information includes changing a quality of service of the data according to the transmitted information.

17. The method of claim 13, wherein:

the information further includes a scene;

said processing data according to the transmitted information includes changing a quality of service of the data; and

the information including a scene, the quality of service of the data of which is changed, is described in a language that describes virtual temporal and spatial layout of encoded objects.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein the language has a binary format for the scene in which the construction of the scene using binary data is described in a compressed manner and a substantial linkage relation among media streams is represented using an object descriptor.

19. A multimedia terminal comprising:

at least one sensor which obtains information including a capability of the multimedia terminal;

a TermCap handler which converts the obtained information to a predetermined format; and

a lightweight application scene description engine which receives the converted information in the predetermined format at predetermined intervals of time or when a server requests the information, and which sends the information to the server via a network access unit.

20. The multimedia terminal of claim 19, wherein the sensor comprises:

a first sensor which receives information regarding a vehicle via an intra vehicle network; and

a second sensor which receives information regarding transmission of data to the multimedia terminal.

21. The multimedia terminal of claim 20, wherein the first sensor measures a distance between the multimedia terminal and either a base station or an access point, and measures an acceleration of the vehicle by measuring the linear distance between the multimedia terminal and either the base station or the access point.

22. The multimedia terminal of claim 20, wherein the second sensor measures signal strength and available bit rate of data received by the multimedia terminal.

23. The multimedia terminal of claim 19, further comprising:

an object decoder which decodes data received by the multimedia terminal into units of objects; and

a scene composer which receives information regarding the representation of a scene from the lightweight application scene description engine, reconstructs the decoded objects as the scene, and outputs the reconstructed scene to a screen.

24. At least one computer readable recording medium storing instructions that control at least one processor to perform a method of providing multimedia services by a computer, wherein the method comprises:

obtaining information regarding the capability of a terminal;

processing data according to the obtained information; and

providing the processed data to the terminal.

25. At least one computer readable recording medium storing instructions that control at least one processor to perform a method of receiving multimedia services by a computer, wherein the method comprises:

transmitting information including capability of a terminal;

processing data according to the transmitted information; and

receiving data processed according to the received information.

26. A method of providing multimedia services from a network to a terminal, comprising:

obtaining information regarding the capability of the terminal, wherein the information includes resource information, movement and location information of the terminal, and signal strength and available bitrate information, which indicates the signal strength and available bitrate for communication between the network and terminal;

processing data including a scene according to the obtained information; and

providing the processed data to the terminal.

27. The method of claim 26, wherein the resource information comprises frame rate, color depth, screen size, graphics hardware, audio output format, maximum audio sampling rate spatial audio capability, central processing unit load, and memory load.

28. The method of claim 26, wherein the scene includes at least one of a still image, text, moving image, and audio.

29. The method of claim 26, wherein said processing data including a scene according to the obtained information includes changing a quality of service of the data, and wherein the scene is described in a language that describes virtual temporal and spatial layout of encoded objects.

30. At least one computer readable recording medium storing instructions that control at least one processor to perform a method of receiving multimedia services by a computer, wherein the method comprises:

obtaining information regarding the capability of the terminal, wherein the information includes resource information, movement and location information of the terminal, and signal strength and available bitrate information, which indicates the signal strength and available bitrate for communication between the network and terminal;

processing data including a scene according to the obtained information; and

providing the processed data to the terminal.