Work package stucture and project organization

CONCERTO is broken down in 7 work-packages, further divided into tasks directly related to the project main objectives. The WP breakdown is the following:

• WP1 is dedicated to management tasks.
• Target scenario and system specifications are defined in WP2: This WP will give the basis for the technical studies (WP3, WP4 and WP5) in terms of requirements and constraints. WP2 will also define the architecture of the system, to allow the deployment of the solutions defined in WP3, WP4, and WP5.
• WP3 addresses image/video coding, image/video quality assessment, and security issues
• WP4 covers media adaptation, protection, prioritisation, and information fusion.
• Content-aware networking and communication is addressed in WP5. This WP focuses on adaptive networking, media caching, and transmission for improved content distribution.
• WP6 covers the development of the software for system simulations and final demonstration. Real-time trials, driven by the end-user, will be also done in this WP.
• Finally, WP7 is devoted to dissemination and exploitation of CONCERTO results

Technical WPs (WP2 to WP6) content and interactions are detailed below.

WP2: Requirements and system architecture

WP2 will consider the overall system aspects of the project and generic scenarios of interest will be proposed in this WP. These scenarios, which will be defined by collecting the requirements of the applications considered by CONCERTO, will be the basis for the technical studies and will impose constraints on parameters of WP3, WP4 and WP5 studies. The scenarios will be evaluated through business case studies to determine their utility to the population and by assessing how well they fit with the roles and business models of existing and emerging actors in the ICT industry. The scenarios could be modified during the course of the project due to findings in the technical and economical studies: The modification of the scenarios will lead to an update of the system requirements. This iterative process will result in scenarios that represent commercially interesting cases of feasible technical implementation.

Based on the results from the technical and economical studies, an efficient system architecture for signalling and data will be designed, thus potentially introducing further technical challenges to be addressed in work-packages 3, 4, and 5.

Inputs: The work in this WP will depend on inputs from all the technical WPs (i.e., WPs 3 to 6) used to specify the system architecture and the required signalling support. The inputs will be of different types, such as characteristics of the modules to deploy, updated performance, and cost/complexity of implementation.

Outputs: The first output from WP2 will be the detailed initial scenario description and the corresponding requirements, which will be used as the initial basis for the work performed in the technical WPs. During the course of the project (WP2) scenarios and corresponding requirements will be updated based on the results obtained in WP2 and in the other WPs.

WP3: Secure QoE-aware image/video coding

WP3 is dedicated to image/video coding algorithms for medical content, e.g., coding of 3D/4D data (e.g., using MVC), HDR coding, and near-lossless and lossless coding. In addition to pure compression, Quality-of-Experience metrics for assessing the diagnostic image quality will be developed. Finally, encryption of medical image/video content will be done for secure transmission. After a state-of-the-art analysis, existing schemes will be adapted and new algorithms will be developed according to the requirements derived in WP2. Finally, the found solutions will be implemented and integrated in the scope of WP6.

Inputs: The work in this WP depends on the input from WP2 on the definition of scenarios. These and the corresponding requirements also to be derived in WP2 will lead the work on image/video coding and quality assessment, and the related security aspects.

Outputs: The output of this work-package will be algorithms for secure QoE-aware image/coding, i.e., algorithms for image/video compression, quality assessment, and respective encryption. The algorithms will be used in WP6 for integration into the system simulator and the demonstrator. In addition, exploitation (IPR, contribution to standardisation, etc.) of the developed algorithms in WP7 is foreseen.

WP4: Context awareness: media adaptation, fusion and protection

This work-package will focus on developing techniques to ensure context-awareness of the CONCERTO content transmission architecture. Context-awareness, such as reliability, scalability and protection of multimedia transmission, are critical issues especially for real-time healthcare applications utilising unreliable wireless networks. The work in this work package is split into three tasks dedicated to different aspects of context-awareness of healthcare applications utilising multimedia transmission: media adaptation, information fusion and protection. The work will start with the evaluation of existing context-awareness solutions and, based on the evaluation and the work done in WP2 (architecture and scenarios), algorithms will be selected, developed and evaluated to be further integrated in WP6 for system simulation and the demonstrator.

Inputs: The work in WP2 will be used as an input for this WP. The most important input from WP2, beside use cases and scenarios, is the overall architecture together with specified cross-layer architecture that will be considered in the definition of the context-aware multimedia solutions for healthcare applications.

Outputs: The first output of this work package will be used in WP2 for more detailed specifications of system architecture and especially of the cross-layer aspects of the system. The algorithms developed for content adaptation, information fusion and protection will be implemented and further integrated into the overall system model in WP6.

WP5: Content-awareness: wireless network support for media transmission

This work-package is devoted to novel content-aware networking solutions as well as to the optimisation of the wireless delivery of MHTM content. This WP is split into three tasks dealing respectively with media caching and network support for MHTM services, content-aware wireless delivery optimisation and cooperative communications for optimised delivery: Multi-route transport layer protocols, traffic prioritisation and scheduling and content-aware resource allocation are, among others, examples of topics considered in this task.

Inputs: The scenarios and the requirements defined in WP2 will be the inputs of WP5. Other inputs are cross-layer information coming from, e.g., the source encoder or the adaptation modules, through the cross-layer signalling framework defined in WP2.

Outputs: The main output of this work package will be the designed schemes, whose performance will be evaluated by simulation in WP6. Some selected schemes will also be integrated in the demonstrator. Moreover, information related to (wireless) network capabilities could be exploited both in WP3 and WP4: This information will be exchanged through WP2’s signalling system.

WP6: Implementation, integration and end-user trials

Selected algorithms will be implemented in this work-package, through progressive steps, into a system simulator and into a final demonstrator. In particular, in order to demonstrate that proposed algorithms are able to work in a real environment,field trials will be planned. Proposed solutions will be validated and assessed via several tests aimed at demonstrating their feasibility and the benefits brought to the end-user.

Inputs: This WP will use inputs from WP2, in terms of scenarios and architectural elements, and from WP3, WP4 and WP5, in terms of algorithms to be implemented.

Output: The main outputs of this WP will be a system simulator to validate the end-to-end performance of the conceived solution and software integration in a real environment. Moreover, this WP will provide to WP2 indications on implementation costs of the different building blocks.