Admux: An Adaptive Multiplexer for Haptic–Audio–Visual Data Communication

Research trends in multimedia strive to incorporate multiple modalities, such as audio, video, graphics, and haptics, into multimedia applications to enhance the user's experience. Researchers have made significant progress in advanced multimedia by incorporating virtual reality environments, haptics, and scent into the human computer interaction paradigm. However, the communication of multimedia data over the Internet (particularly the haptic media) remains a real challenge since each media has varying and sometimes conflicting communication requirements. This paper proposes Admux, an adaptive application layer multiplexing framework (including a communication protocol) for multimedia applications incorporating haptic, visual, auditory, and scent data for nondedicated networks. Being an application layer framework, Admux is highly adaptable to the application requirements, the media type (haptic, audio, video, etc.), and the network conditions. To facilitate the application-Admux communication, we used haptic application metalanguage descriptions. Second, Admux enhances the network throughput by adopting statistical multiplexing. Finally, Admux enables media prioritization based on the application events and QoS requirements. By simulating an interpersonal teleconferencing system (named the HugMe system), our results showed that Admux provides dynamic bandwidth allocation based on the network conditions, media type, and application events.