We demonstrate EigenNews, a personalized television news system. Upon visiting the EigenNews website, a user is shown a variety of news videos which have been automatically selected based on her individual preferences. These videos are extracted from 16 continually recorded television programs using a multimodal segmentation algorithm. Relevant metadata for each video are generated by linking videos to online news articles. Selected news videos can be watched in three different layouts and on various devices.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a new wireless technology that transfers data over shorter distances with higher data rates and lower transmission power. WiMedia Alliance's Media Access Control (MAC) protocols for UWB-based wireless personal area networks have become an international standard. The Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP) is part of this standard that reserves the wireless channel on a slot-by-slot basis for different flows. Knowing that one of the most common use of DRP is to transport multimedia traffic, we propose distributed reservation algorithms for UWB-based home networks according to the video streaming traffic specification and quality-of-service requirement. The proposed algorithms also take the WiMedia UWB MAC policies into account. We analyze and validate the reservation algorithms and policies with a tiered overflow model, and evaluate and compare their performance with Network Simulator (NS-2) and a MPEG-4 video traffic generator. We further discuss the ways of improving video streaming quality and system resource utilization in UWB-based home networks.

With the proliferation of wireless technologies and the convenience they offer, transporting Quality-of-Service (QoS) demanding traffic such as compressed video over wireless links becomes a trend and a challenging issue. Among many factors, Media Access Control (MAC) protocols play an important role in the network stack to ensure the QoS provisioning for multimedia applications and the efficient utilization of wireless channels. Various contention-based or contention-free MAC protocols have been proposed to solve these problems. In this paper, we model, analyze with an existing framework, and evaluate two reservation algorithms, subframe-fit and isozone-fit, proposed for distributed reservation protocols exampled by WiMedia UWB MAC. The models have been validated by extensive simulations using ns-2 and an MPEG-4 traffic generator. We further improve the system performance by introducing cross-isozone allocation and on-demand compaction to isozone-fit, and discuss how to leverage both contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols.