Selected Topics of Multimedia Systems Research: The Beginnings

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Carsten Griwodz, Andreas Mauthe, Lars C. Wolf

Published: 2024, Last Modified: 04 May 2026From Multimedia Communications to the Future Internet 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: In the 1980s multimedia became one of the most prominent research areas in systems and communication. Early work around these topics were carried out at the European Networking Center (ENC) in Heidelberg. The so called HeiProjects formed a project suite where the most relevant research topics in this space were addressed. It was, for instance, investigated what the specific requirements of multimedia are and how they can be supported through networks and operating systems (OS). The concept of streaming to provide a good user experience was also introduced. This was initially associated with Quality of Service (QoS). MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Expert Group) was another relevant topic to support multimedia throughout the networked system context and Quality of Experience (QoE) became a topic of interest. Ralf Steinmetz and the team were also some of the first to address synchronisation in all the various forms within a multimedia system. In this chapter, some of this early research is recalled and the lessons learned are discussed.