Message from the General Chairs

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to welcome you to MobiMedia'08, the 4th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference. The conference was initiated in 2005 in Orlando, Florida with a target to provide a unique international forum for researchers in the field of multimedia service access networks. For the year 2006 the conference landed in Europe and to island of Sardinia. The last year's conference held in Nafpaktos, Greece enhanced the event to three days with emphasising even more the network communications and multimedia delivery in heterogeneous network environment.

When thinking of the different user services currently available in Internet, starting for example from such services as Youtube, Facebook, Second Life, and World of Warcraft the multimedia delivery is one of the key elements in each of these. The level of usage of these services is constantly increasing and not only in the fixed network enviroment but also with mobile user devices. Although multimedia communications is currently studied widely the multimedia delivery especially in the wireless and mobile networks is still a challenging task and requires exhaustive research in order to provide solutions which satisfy the users and are able to guarantee adequte service quality and quality of experience. In addition to the technical challenges, the business models for utilising multimedia services efficiently need to be addressed as well. One key question is also, how the multimedia communications will impact to the development of the next generation Internet and how the solutions gained from the multimedia research could help in forming qualitatively better networks.

During the MobiMedia 2008 conference we have total of six technical sessions concentrating on video and audio coding solutions, delivery mechanisms and new applications and services. In addition there are two special sessions addressing on future Internet and co-operative networking, and sensor networking in multimedia delivery.

We would like to thank all the volunteers who have shared their talent, dedication and time for the conference arrangements as well as all our technical and financial sponsors. The MobiMedia is technically sponsored by the ACM and the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia. We would like to thank also our other sponsors ICST, VTT and Create-Net and all volunteers in those organizations, who have participated and made this conference possible. Especially we would like to thank our Local organizing chair, Sari Mäläskä and conference co-ordinator Dorothy Bany, who have done a tremendous work for the conference organizing. We would like to express our gratitude also to Technical program chair Frank Fitzek, who has done great job organizing the special sessions, and workshop chair Maria Martini with organizing the and making the workshops on Wednesday possible. We would like to thank also especially Prof. Lajos Hanzo, Prof. Petri Mähönen and Dr. Martin Hahn for keeping the valuable keynote speeches. It is our pleasure to have also two tutorials during the conference and thus we would like to thank Prof. Yoshito Tobe and Prof. Masayuki Iwai to be able to come and keep an tutorial about the sensor networking, and Prof. Frank Fitzek and Dr. Marcos Katz for the tutorial about co-operative wireless networking.

We hope that you will find the conference both enjoyable and valuable and also enjoy the peaceful athmosphere of city of Oulu. We also hope that you can find lot's of new ideas and inspiration for you further studies in the area of mobile multimedia communications during this conference.

Sincerely,
Tapio Frantti
Jyrki Huusko