Mobile image handling

As within desktop environments, the efficient handling of multimedia data is an indispensable reuqirement that must be fulfilled within mobile environments. To that end, mobile-dedicated concepts, methods, and techniques are needed because mobile data handling is inevitably subject to the inherent shortcomings of mobile environments. Within our work, two classes of technical issues which need to be dealt with are identified: off-line issues and on-line issues. Off-line issues concern what functionaltiy should be provided and how. On-line issues concern run-time "planning" to achieve an optimal quality of service according to user demands and the actual state of the available resources. This paper further proposes a high level of system architecture of mobile systems capable of multimedia data handling. Within this architecture, a service interface separates domain-specific applications and services of general functionality. The service interface offers a platform upon which mobile appl ications can be built efficiently. Quality of Service (QoS) provides a good means to specify the interface, i.e., QoS parameters can be used as arguments for interface primitives. As we believe that a "detailed solution" is needid to provide multimedia data handling within mobile environments, a medium- specific services interface, the service interface of mobile image handling, is presented in this paper.