Special issue on quality-driven cross-layer design for multimedia communications

With the fast-paced development of multimedia computing technologies, multimedia services have become pervasive. However, the design methodology of multimedia communications has still been based on the Internet architecture designed for loss-sensitive delay-insensitive data services, which is no longer applicable for multimedia communications. We believe user-perceived quality is the holy grail of multimedia communications systems. Thus, designing for quality will change the traditional paradigm of multimedia communications. Quality-driven cross-layer design focuses on bridging the gap between users' experience and multimedia systems, since it has been long ignored in previous research. We also hope this special issue can spark and stimulate the research and practice on quality-driven cross-layer optimized multimedia communications.