Reducing complexity and achieving comparability. Because research on streaming protocols is becoming more and more complex, scientists need to invest a lot of time to construct simulation environments for evaluating their ideas. Due to the lack of published source-code from other researchers, a fair comparison between different solutions proposed in the literature is hard and requires re-implementing other people's protocols and models over and over again. This is time-consuming and it makes problems. Errors may remain undetected when only a single researcher or a single team works on the code. Duplicate implementations are likely to follow incompatible assumptions which renders comparative results useless.

Sharing ideas and results. In response Project Noja establishes a platform for researchers for sharing source code, experiences, and best practices in the field of multimedia streaming. Noja focuses on streaming protocols, simulation models and optimization frameworks, but also seeks contributions for other topics such as privacy and security. In addition, Project Noja develops a common simulation platform for streaming protocol research. This website offers the following downloads and services:

Benefits. NojaSim allows researchers to quickly construct simulations from existing building blocks. It is easy to integrate new protocols and optimization models and to define new application environments. NojaSim provides common tools for bitstream analysis, simulation setup and result evaluations. By using the same set of tools and configurations, simulation results can finally become comparable even across research groups. Since all code is freely available, its correctness can be assured by multiple research teams. We hope, that other research groups are willing to share their experiences and source code as well.