Networked digital media

Excerpt

Telecommunication systems have gone through tremendous changes in the past few decades and gained a special place in our daily lives at work and at home. This has been possible, among others, thanks to the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model by International Standardization Organization, which provides a simple, structured, and flexible abstract model to represent complex telecommunication systems by dividing them into seven layers and their interfaces. Although, this approach has been instrumental in definition of basic architecture and components in telecommunications, it has at the same time compartmented problems into rather isolated islands, which at best take into account some considerations of their neighboring layers in their design for solutions in each layer. With recent progress of user-centric, dependable, and secure multimedia communications and the maturity of the OSI to cope with multimedia solutions and services, it is time to revisit this fundamental way of looking into telecommunication systems and to seek for a more holistic and end-to-end architectures that go beyond the limitations of OSI model. …