UMA gives you the right format

By Even Gran
Photo: Rune Petter Ness

A research team at NTNU is in the process of establishing a common framework for how mobile phones, computers, TV-sets and other digital communication tools will receive its multimedia information in the right format.

Many formats - one text. Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) can solve the problem of how to distribute digital information in the future.

In the future, a digital newspaper article could be distributed via many channels. We might be able to read the same article on our mobile phones (cell-phones), on a hand-held computer, and on a digital display-board in town. Even so, the actual computer file will be located in just one place. This requires a new way of thinking and a new system. The Departments of Telecommunications and Telematics at NTNU are currently working on making this possible.

Requires a common standard
The new broadband system UMTS (which is taking over from the old GSM system) will make it possible for us to do things like sending and receiving live images and digital sound via our mobile phones. The mobile phone is in the process of turning into a small hand-held computer through which it will be possible to access all kinds of rich multimedia content. In future, there will be a wide range of hand-held or portable computers, anything from the tiny, light mobile phone and up to the powerful, stationary PC in the office or the TV set in your living-room. They will all be capable of receiving and sending text, sound, still pictures and live images over the Internet.

However, because of the wide range of receivers involved, the same information will have to be transmitted and received in many different ways, in different file formats and in varying resolutions. Somehow these all have to be linked up with one another. At the moment, NTNU is in the process of developing such a framework, along with a research team consisting of representatives from NTNU, Ericsson, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Wollongong, Columbia University and IBM.

Linking digital information
The concept on which this group is working is called Universal Multimedia Access (UMA). UMA will operate as follows: as we have seen, the source of information will be found in one particular place, such as on a server. If you want to get hold of a news item via your mobile phone, for instance, you contact the central server, which can detect that you are using a mobile phone and that you therefore need to receive the text in a format which the mobile phone can read. The main server will convert the content of the article (sound, text, pictures) into the format you need, and send it to you.

Initiative from NTNU
- The initiative to push forward with UMA by means of national and European projects has come from NTNU, says Andrew Perkis, associate professor at the Department of Telecommunications. He has recently received funding from the Research Council of Norway to work on UMA within the IKT 2010-programme. Perkis says that NTNU's main contribution will be in media conversion and transcoding and the Internet as part of UMA.

- Conversion between things such as different sound formats or still pictures is relatively simple, says Perkis. The challenge lies in converting different modalities such as sound and text in such a way that sound information can be downloaded as text and vice versa. The team is also working on making the system able to convert live images and still pictures automatically as needed - for example when the Internet is overloaded. Here the system will create central 'key pictures' from the live film which have been picked out to illustrate the sound information, so that we do not have to watch an unclear film.

Perkis believes that the UMA concept will dominate the means of communication through the world-wide system for distribution of digital information. However, he cannot ignore the fact that rivals in the mobile phone market may have similar plans under development which they are keeping very much to themselves.

* Contact at NTNU: Andrew Perkis
Tel: + 47 73 59 23 83
E-mail: Andrew.Perkis@tele.ntnu.no