To achieve the ultimate goals of total freedom in self-expression, seamless mobile access, and any time anywhere media consumption, technology advances in various areas need to be reexamined and joined utilized under a coherent optimization framework to reach an efficient end-to-end media delivery solution. New models, metrics, and methodologies in both source, and channel coding, distributed and collaborative communications are needed to intelligently adapt the multimedia content to suit user preferences, meet device and network constraints, and achieve better communication resource utilization. The source coding and adaptation decisions of media sources need to be reconciled with the limited network resources, end-user preferences, and resource allocation schemes at network nodes. Distributed optimization schemes like pricing and game theoretical approaches are needed to improve resource allocation and management efficiency.

This special issue seeks original contributions of highquality papers that report the recent advances in multimedia coding, adaptation, and transmission approaches that support multiuser collaboration and optimize the network performance for multimedia communications. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Source/channel coding/adaptation techniques for increasing the elasticity of multimedia traffic
• Collaborative multicast schemes utilizing source and channel diversity for efficient multimedia distribution
• Distributed resource allocation and management for multimedia communication
• Network utility maximization based on collaborative multimedia communication
• Pricing models for collaborative multimedia transmission
• Game theoretical models for multimedia contents interactions