Preface

In the late 1990s, multimedia streaming research was popular, and algorithms for delivering improved quality-of-service (QoS) over the Internet were at a high point. This was also the Ph.D. thesis topic of Tarek Abdelzaher, the second author of this book.

“When I was approaching graduation,” Abdelzaher recalls, “I remember being asked on one of my interviews ‘Won’t your multimedia streaming research career be short?”’. Abdelzaher did not understand the question and asked the interviewer why he thought this should be the case. His reply was very insightful: “Your research is about improving human experience by streaming higher quality content through limited resources. Humans, however, have a sensory saturation limit—a maximum bandwidth ...

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