Driven by the massive deployment of wireless infrastructures and ever-growing demand for mobile multimedia applications, video streaming already dominates the global internet traffic. Current internet traffic reports indicate that the multimedia traffic will tend to account for an overwhelming majority of the internet traffic in future years. We can forecast that content-rich multimedia applications (e.g. mobile television, mobile video conference, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) video, three-dimensional (3D) audio/video, and online video games, etc.) will become the mainstream applications in the future mobile internet.

However, the current mobile internet poses several critical challenges as a platform for multimedia applications. The most efficient internet infrastructure cannot provide any quality assurance for real-time multimedia streaming services. The ever-increasing user interests in a wide range of mobile multimedia applications underscore the need to provide promising computing techniques, transmission protocols, and distribution frameworks for such mobile multimedia applications. Meanwhile, fifth generation mobile communication (5G MC), mobile edge computing (MEC), content-centric networking (CCN), software-defined networking (SDN), cloud computing (CC), machine learning (ML), and blockchain technologies are considered as the significant driving forces for the development of the current and future Internet. These emerging technologies able to support diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements for mobile multimedia applications have received a wide range of research interests.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collate original research and review articles discussing the state of the art in the field. We hope that this Special Issue will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of mobile multimedia technologies.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Architecture, protocols, and methodologies of mobile multimedia applications
• New applications of 5G mobile multimedia systems
• ML algorithms for mobile multimedia streaming services
• Orchestration of software-defined networking (SDN) or network virtualization (NV) for mobile multimedia applications
• Device-to-Device communications for mobile multimedia streaming
• CC, CCN, or MEC technologies for mobile multimedia computing
• New Mobile interactive multimedia and VR/AR applications
• Security and privacy in mobile multimedia systems
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)-empowered mobile multimedia computing
• Blockchain-enabled privacy preservation techniques for multimedia computing
• Multimedia innovations for 3D virtual worlds and the metaverse