An Adaptive Multimedia Transmission Control for Telemedicine Applications

Abstract

In the telemedicine applications, multimedia information may contain various media objects, such as video, audio, medical image, image annotation, and consultation control messages. Different object types have different proprieties such as presentation importance, quality requirement, priority, and the tolerance of the transmission delay and loss. Due to the network heterogeneity, resource constraints, and random traffic characteristic, the transmission of the media objects may encounter the packet delay, loss, and jitter. For the proper presentation of multimedia objects during the teleconsultation, the multimedia transmission necessitates an intelligent mechanism. In this paper, an adaptive multimedia transmission control mechanism for telemedicine applications is proposed to reduce the network affection. According to the characteristics of telemedicine applications, different types of media objects are classified and applied to different transmission approaches to enhance the efficiency of bandwidth and quality of service. The bandwidth is dynamically allocated depending on the characteristics of the transmitted data so that the utilization of bandwidth is promoted, and quality of service is maintained.