Exchanging XML multimedia containers using a binary XML protocol

XML is becoming increasingly popular as the ubiquitous standard for metadata; consequently, it is being incorporated into many multimedia applications, such as those based on MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. However, XML is often verbose and transmitting the large filescan be wasteful in bandwidth and power-limited mobile applications. This paper introduces an XML access mechanism, RXEP, which combines XML compression with a fragment access protocol. RXEP ensures that essential information is exchanged efficiently while minimising superfluous XML content transmission. This makes XML containers an attractive technique for multimedia content delivery.