Working Assumptions and Challenges. This discussion in the previous section leads to our grounding assumptions for modelling and analysing interactive media systems: An interactive media system is delivered by multi-stakeholders offering combinations of services and underlying resources to support desired end-to-end communication process responses. Each stakeholder owns and controls resources required by the services they offer. Each stakeholder may access other resources through services offered by other stakeholders. Each stakeholder uses existing service management tools and processes to manage resources and commitments to customers according to their own defined multi-criteria key performance indicators (KPIs). The current situation we are dealing with is XXX content delivered over the Internet by Media Service Providers without the involvement of a Network Operator in the control or distribution of the content. Each stakeholder independently optimises resource utilisation and service quality through processes to monitor and predict sufficient system state information, e.g., provided through MPEG-DASH [MPEGDASH], needed for autonomic and human decision- making. The desired situation we are targeting is for platform capabilities providing mechanisms for Media Service Providers and Network Operators to work together in the management of resources required for control and distribution of content. Improving the quality of state information shared between stakeholders and control mechanisms has the potential to improve the quality of decision making in service management processes. These assumptions scope our approach: We should position our approach in the context of service management processes but should not necessarily adopt a specific set of guidelines. We should not replace existing service management mechanisms used by each stakeholder with a new global management mechanism that optimises across all resources, as this would be futile. We should explore ways to improve the efficiently and effectiveness of existing service management mechanisms contributing to end-to-end delivery of a communication process through appropriate sharing of information and control. The challenges we must therefore address include: How to capture end-to-end content flows between multiple stakeholders and relate these to allocated resources? How to improve the dependability (i.e. accuracy and consistency) of shared state in communication processes considering the distributed nature of int...
