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This paper proposes a multicast content download service based on the use of residual network capacity to push multimedia content to available local storage in personal multimedia devices. The service under study is based on the FLUTE protocol. Specifically, FLUTE packets fill the spare capacity in the IP tunnels reserved for the primary streaming service (opportunistic insertion). The paper also evaluates the use of application layer–forward error correction (AL-FEC) parity to overcome transmission errors, object multiplexing to send the most popular multimedia contents more frequently and cache management policies that consider user preferences to keep in storage the most useful items. The service has been evaluated through simulations and measurements performed with an application prototype based on the DVB-H standards. The results show that AL-FEC enables the use of residual capacity for background content download services. In turn, AL-FEC, as well as object multiplexing, improves the relation between the number of content items and the overall access time. Moreover, results show that high percentages of requests can be served from the local cache of the service, provided that it is possible to estimate the popularity of content items and the user preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the topology of a multimedia tourism service that targets mobile devices equipped with broadband and either multicast or broadcast access capabilities. Multicast / Broadcast access is used to handle the delivery of multimedia data to many simultaneous users in the service area. The solution adopted is based on existing standards for mobile TV services, but introducing features that enable the provision of generic multimedia services on top of mobile hybrid broadband and broadcast networks. Furthermore, this paper shows how to use standardized interfaces originally defined for interactive mobile TV broadcasting to build personalized mobile multimedia services that do not deal with TV contents or are not necessarily coupled to a mobile TV service bundle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]