1 Introduction

Emerging ubiquitous multimedia services are expected to be available anytime, anywhere, and using different computing devices. Services such as audio/video streaming, digital libraries, on-line businesses, and live camera remote surveillance are widely deployed. Users will be able to access these services anytime, anywhere, and using any computing device in a pervasive way. For example, a user may bring a PDA on a field trip, carry a laptop (with both wireless and wired network cards) on a business trip, use high performance workstations at work, and use desktop PCs at home (with dial-up, cable, or DSL connection). In another example, a user continues to watch the soccer game over home TV, while he watches the game through a mobile device out of home. Some other ubiquitous multimedia services include mobile games and entertainment, mobile blog, mobile community, home network, and so on.

Since ubiquitous multimedia services are constructed on the convergence of various networks (wired or wireless networks, broadcasting or multicasting networks, broadband or band-limited networks, etc.) and devices (PC, PDA, Cell Phone, TV, Camera, etc.), the new challenge in multimedia service management is to deal with heterogeneous client capabilities and dynamic end-to-end resources availability, and to ensure satisfactory service quality for each client. Additionally, privacy, security and ethical issues are becoming increasingly important topics in ubiquitous services.

This special issue of the Information Systems Frontiers aims to expose the readership to the latest research results on ubiquitous multimedia services. It is composed of seven selected papers, covering the interesting topics, e.g., mobile chatting system, ubiquitous surveillance system, personalized news consuming system, home networking systems, etc., demonstrating pioneer work, investigating the novel solutions and discussing the future trends in this field.

2 The papers in this special issue

The first paper, “MILC: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Mobile Instant Locator with Chatting” by (A. Loukas et al. 2010), presents a mobile application scheme, named MILC, that not only supports location-based services and mobile instant messaging but also provides real security and privacy solutions. Thus, the users can chat, interchange geographic coordinates and make Splashes in real-time in control of their own personal information and private sphere. The scheme’s architecture, protocols, security and privacy issues are presented and discussed in detail. Additionally, the prototype implemented in Google’s Android OS shows the system’s good properties.

In the second paper, “Effective Distributed Service Architecture for Ubiquitous Video Surveillance” by (T.-C. Wang et al. 2010), a distributed and secure architecture for ubiquitous video surveillance (UVS) services is proposed, which is suitable for the condition of Internet or wireless networks. Based on cloud computing, the users can consume UVS services without local physical infrastructure, platform or software. In this scheme, the AES security mechanism, multicast overlay network and forward error correction (FEC) are adopted to protect the service privacy, preserve the service scalability and provide reliable UVS video streaming, respectively. The experimental test-bed is implemented to show the proposed scheme’s good performances.

The third paper, “Automatic and Fast Temporal Segmentation for Personalized News Consuming” by (Y. Dong and S. Lian 2010), presents a ubiquitous news program consuming system, which provides the on-demand services to mobile consumers or Internet/home TV consumers. In this system, the automatic news program segmentation and classification is proposed to reorganize the news program according to the news’ topics. The core technique, i.e., video temporal segmentation, is introduced, evaluated and compared with existing ones. Experimental results show the proposed system’s good performances, such as low computational cost and high correct detection rate.

In the fourth paper, “Advanced Secure Multimedia Services for Digital Homes” by (R. Roman et al. 2010), the secure and ubiquitous digital home system, named Feel@Home, is proposed. This system enables the users to demand access and possibly share such multimedia contents as photographs, videos and music from any location and with any device. Additionally, the security issues in Feel@Home are analysed, the security and privacy requirements are discussed, and the potential solutions are presented. As the example, the security building blocks are investigated to protect both IMS-based and VPN-based solutions.

The fifth paper, “Security Model for Emergency Real-Time Communications in Autonomous Networks” by (E. A. Panaousis et al. 2010), proposes a framework for emergency real-time communication using autonomous networks, called emergency Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (eMANETs). It targets for the needs of any society against any event that threatens serious damage to human welfare or to the environment. In this framework, a secure routing protocol, intrusion detection provision and security extension for real-time communications using peer-to-peer overlays are adopted. It is expect to be deployed in emergency cases where default telecommunications infrastructure has failed.

In the sixth paper, “Third Party Application Control on Quality of Service in IP Based Multimedia Networks” by (E. Pencheva and I. Atanasov 2010), the capabilities for open access to resource management that is one of the challenging issues in convergent and ubiquitous networks are investigated. By analysing the policy and charging control functions in Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), the paper identifies the requirements for third party application control on quality of service (QoS). The Open Service Access (OSA) and Parlay X interfaces are designed and evaluated for supporting dynamic QoS control in IMS, and their implementation issues are discussed. This research topic is expected to attract more researchers in the near future.

The last paper, “Modeling the Influence of Network Delay on the User Experience in Distributed Home-Automation Networks” by (M. Umberger et al. 2010), investigates the user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) in modern home-automation systems and services (HASS), which is also one of the key challenges in ubiquitous multimedia services. The subjective QoE assessment is proposed to measure the influence of network delay on HASS devices communication. Furthermore, the objective QoE assessment models are presented to represent the influence of network delay on a subjective QoE assessment for various HASS tasks. The users’ satisfaction with respect to different network delays is tested by practical simulations. This paper mentions the novel research topic, and is expected to attract more readers.