Guest Editorial: Advances in Multimedia Signal Processing and Communication Technologies for Future Networking Systems

The rapid increase in computing power and the speed of communication, coupled with the availability of computer storage facilities, has led to a new era of multimedia applications. Multimedia is everywhere, we can feel it in almost all applications from online video databases, IPTV presence, interactive multimedia, social interaction based multimedia, to the emerging Fifth Generation (5G) systems mobile social networks which will play an important role for disseminating information and multimedia contents [1]. These new applications require high quality data storage, easy access to multimedia content and reliable delivery, and are close to commercial deployment. They also arouse a higher awareness of security and intellectual property management issues. All of the above requirements have put forward higher requirements for multimedia signal processing and communications.