From December 2001, INOV participates in the OLYMPIC European project from the IST (Information Societies Technology) program, where it is responsible by the distribution of audio and video in fixed and mobile IP networks.

The global objective of the OLYMPIC project is to develop an original alternative to the visualization of activities and events of the Olympic Games, to be held in 2004 in Athens. The World Wide Web will be used as the dissemination media, providing personalized video through the Internet to fixed or mobile users. The existence of hundreds of digital cameras to broadcast the live events to TV stations makes the project very attractive and cost-effective.

The INOV contribution to the project is based on the development of techniques for the IP networks that will allow an efficient distribution of live audio and video over local networks and over the Internet. The main goal is the development of a network architecture that combines the IP multicast/unicast protocols with QoS (DiffServ), enabling an efficient real-time audio/video distribution over IP networks. The following areas present the INOV activities in the project scope:

• QoS studies
  Consists in the development of studies for guarantying the quality of service (QoS) in real-time multicast/unicast distribution services. These studies will lead to the design, implementation and integration of the network improvements.
  
• Multi-Streaming (simultaneous encoding)
  It consists in the simultaneous encoding (multi-channel system) of an event with different rates, to cover several terminal equipments (PCs, SetTop Boxes, PDAs, Mobile phones) and several access technologies (LAN, Cable HFC-TV, ADSL, ISDN, Modem).
  
• Continuous monitoring
  The standard IP networks cannot guarantee a constant transmission rate and quality to the users, so it is necessary a continuous monitoring of several parameters and statistics related with the transmitted streams/sessions.
  
• Source encoding adaptation
  By actuating at the transmission level of each stream/session enables an optimisation of the video quality received by each group of users (grouped by transmission rates). Based on monitored parameters and statistics allows the adaptation of each stream/session transmission rates in order to optimise the medium quality of each group transmission.
  
• Selective frame marking and dropping
  Heterogeneity is one of the problems related with the transmission of audio/video over IP networks. One possible solution is the implementation of filtering and selecting mechanisms at the transmission protocols level, through the marking and dropping of video packets/frames in real-time (prioritised frame dropping). For achieving these requirements, INOV needs an advanced knowledge in the content transmission (MPEG1/2,MPEG4) and in the transport protocols (RTP, UDP, TCP, IP).