The Network and Media Lab (NML) is located at DOCOMO USA Labs, an internationally recognized research center for wireless access, networking, and multimedia communications. We create novel and fundamental network architecture concepts and multimedia technologies targeting contributions to open scientific literature and international standards. Always recruiting and maintaining the best talent and expertise, NML aims to be a fundamental resource in creating new network solutions and multimedia services and enhancing the existing offerings for NTT DOCOMO. We collaborate with and share the resources of the NTT DOCOMO R&D Center (Yokosuka Research Park) and several other prestigious research centers and universities. NML provides an ideal advanced industrial research environment enabling a close interaction between all aspects of network and media research activities.

Now that the Internet has become the universal communication infrastructure, some of its basic architectural elements are being challenged by the requirements of new applications and practices. The most important among these are mobility, security, and changing traffic types. Since a significant percentage of the end points in the future network will be mobile, the routing and addressing mechanisms originally designed for fixed networks are starting to cause increased complexity and therefore network management concerns. Similarly, commercial use of the Internet for transportation of private data has made security a fundamental concern since the original Internet architecture was basically developed for non-profit uses. Inability to prevent denial of service attacks is one well-known and extremely damaging artifact of this. One approach to solving some of the security problems is a redefinition of economic structure of the Internet. Such a definition may also be needed to provide incentives for improving services offered by the connection providers. The change in the dominating payload type on the Internet from time insensitive data to real-time media, and particularly video, requires reconsideration of transport algorithms for better handling of congestion and fair use of resources. Our network architecture research in NML targets finding solutions for these significant problems to improve the core network performance, leading to novel architectures for future networks. Our work spans a wide range of approaches, from theoretical to prototyping, always with a target of network deployment.

In addition to the network architecture, efficient and expert handling of multimedia data, particularly video, plays a central role in enabling ubiquitous and seamless communications services. A thorough understanding of multimedia data compression, processing and delivery, and creation of related intellectual property are absolute requirements for success in offering new communications services profitably. Audio and video data formats are in a continuing evolution. High quality, multi channel audio, high definition, and multidimensional or free-viewpoint video are already being considered as viable formats for mobile communications. Although our next generation radio access and core networking technologies are expected to provide extremely high bandwidths to customers, multimedia compression still remains essential because it provides higher quality of service today, and no bandwidth can ever be sufficient for the creative multimedia services of tomorrow. Helping to create the world's most efficient audio and video codecs is one of the missions of NML. Our research is not limited to the compression; however, to compensate for limited playback capabilities of mobile terminals, we research innovative signal processing methods such as nonlinear signal processing, and media enhancing technologies as well.

The service possibilities that can be created with the emerging networking technologies and new data formats are unlimited and extremely exciting. We must anticipate these opportunities. Understanding and influencing how new business scenarios will emerge in this new commercial framework is a vital part in the design of growth strategies. We are thus pursuing exciting and highly dynamic research aimed at developing models of operation that will be enjoyed by the new wirelessly-connected community.

In 2008, our research topics are focused on two main research projects:
1. Network Architecture Project
2. Video Project