An efficient multimedia data handling is a fundamental requirement of mobile multimedia applications. To accommodate this requirement, issues of the available technologies as well as mobile multimedia data access and transfer processes, and the characteristics of the medium to be handled should all be taken into consideration. For this end, these aspects are investigated. The results of the investigation lead to the conclusion that an expressive task specification and adaptive multimedia data handling should be provided. With an expressive task specification, a demand for accessing multimedia object can be described flexibly to enable a minimum handling overhead (thus high performance) and an optimal compromise between performance, cost and quality. Adaptive media handling functionality adapts the service performance according to the medium to be accessed, the available resources and compromise preference of a mobile client, etc. This paper presents the new concepts and methods for these two aspects. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.
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