The state of peer-to-peer network simulators

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey of a combined total of over 280 papers from before and after 2007 (the year of the last survey in this area), and comment on the large quantity of research using bespoke, closed-source simulators. We propose a set of criteria that P2P simulators should meet, and poll the P2P research community for their agreement. We aim to drive the community towards performing their experiments on simulators that allow for others to validate their results

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

Mathematical analysis of scheduling policies in peer-to-peer video streaming networks

Las redes de pares son comunidades virtuales autogestionadas, desarrolladas en la capa de aplicación sobre la infraestructura de Internet, donde los usuarios (denominados pares) comparten recursos (ancho de banda, memoria, procesamiento) para alcanzar un fin común. La distribución de video representa la aplicación más desafiante, dadas las limitaciones de ancho de banda. Existen básicamente tres servicios de video. El más simple es la descarga, donde un conjunto de servidores posee el contenido original, y los usuarios deben descargar completamente este contenido previo a su reproducción. Un segundo servicio se denomina video bajo demanda, donde los pares se unen a una red virtual siempre que inicien una solicitud de un contenido de video, e inician una descarga progresiva en línea. El último servicio es video en vivo, donde el contenido de video es generado, distribuido y visualizado simultáneamente. En esta tesis se estudian aspectos de diseño para la distribución de video en vivo y bajo demanda. Se presenta un análisis matemático de estabilidad y capacidad de arquitecturas de distribución bajo demanda híbridas, asistidas por pares. Los pares inician descargas concurrentes de múltiples contenidos, y se desconectan cuando lo desean. Se predice la evolución esperada del sistema asumiendo proceso Poisson de arribos y egresos exponenciales, mediante un modelo determinístico de fluidos. Un sub-modelo de descargas secuenciales (no simultáneas) es globalmente y estructuralmente estable, independientemente de los parámetros de la red. Mediante la Ley de Little se determina el tiempo medio de residencia de usuarios en un sistema bajo demanda secuencial estacionario. Se demuestra teóricamente que la filosofía híbrida de cooperación entre pares siempre desempeña mejor que la tecnología pura basada en cliente-servidor

Individualisation avancée des services IPTV

Le monde de la TV est en cours de transformation de la télévision analogique à la télévision numérique, qui est capable de diffuser du contenu de haute qualité, offrir aux consommateurs davantage de choix, et rendre l'expérience de visualisation plus interactive. IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) présente une révolution dans la télévision numérique dans lequel les services de télévision numérique sont fournis aux utilisateurs en utilisant le protocole Internet (IP) au dessus d une connexion haut débit. Les progrès de la technologie IPTV permettra donc un nouveau modèle de fourniture de services. Les fonctions offertes aux utilisateurs leur permettent de plus en plus d autonomie et de plus en plus de choix. Il en est notamment ainsi de services de type nTS (pour network Time Shifting en anglais) qui permettent à un utilisateur de visionner un programme de télévision en décalage par rapport à sa programmation de diffusion, ou encore des services de type nPVR (pour network Personal Video Recorder en anglais) qui permettent d enregistrer au niveau du réseau un contenu numérique pour un utilisateur. D'autre part, l'architecture IMS proposée dans NGN fournit une architecture commune pour les services IPTV. Malgré les progrès rapides de la technologie de télévision interactive (comprenant notamment les technologies IPTV et NGN), la personnalisation de services IPTV en est encore à ses débuts. De nos jours, la personnalisation des services IPTV se limite principalement à la recommandation de contenus et à la publicité ciblée. Ces services ne sont donc pas complètement centrés sur l utilisateur, alors que choisir manuellement les canaux de diffusion et les publicités désirées peut représenter une gêne pour l utilisateur. L adaptation des contenus numériques en fonction de la capacité des réseaux et des dispositifs utilisés n est pas encore prise en compte dans les implémentations actuelles. Avec le développement des technologies numériques, les utilisateurs sont amenés à regarder la télévision non seulement sur des postes de télévision, mais également sur des smart phones, des tablettes digitales, ou encore des PCs. En conséquence, personnaliser les contenus IPTV en fonction de l appareil utilisé pour regarder la télévision, en fonction des capacités du réseau et du contexte de l utilisateur représente un défi important. Cette thèse présente des solutions visant à améliorer la personnalisation de services IPTV à partir de trois aspects: 1) Nouvelle identification et authentification pour services IPTV. 2) Nouvelle architecture IPTV intégrée et comportant un système de sensibilité au contexte pour le service de personnalisation. 3) Nouveau service de recommandation de contenu en fonction des préférences de l utilisateur et aussi des informations contextesInternet Protocol TV (IPTV) delivers television content to users over IP-based network. Different from the traditional TV services, IPTV platforms provide users with large amount of multimedia contents with interactive and personalized services, including the targeted advertisement, on-demand content, personal video recorder, and so on. IPTV is promising since it allows to satisfy users experience and presents advanced entertainment services. On the other hand, the Next Generation Network (NGN) approach in allowing services convergence (through for instance coupling IPTV with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture or NGN Non-IMS architecture) enhances users experience and allows for more services personalization. Although the rapid advancement in interactive TV technology (including IPTV and NGN technologies), services personalization is still in its infancy, lacking the real distinguish of each user in a unique manner, the consideration of the context of the user (who is this user, what is his preferences, his regional area, location, ..) and his environment (characteristics of the users devices screen types, size, supported resolution, and networks available network types to be used by the user, available bandwidth, .. ) as well as the context of the service itself (content type and description, available format HD/SD , available language, ..) in order to provide the adequate personalized content for each user. This advanced IPTV services allows services providers to promote new services and open new business opportunities and allows network operators to make better utilization of network resources through adapting the delivered content according to the available bandwidth and to better meet the QoE (Quality of Experience) of clients. This thesis focuses on enhanced personalization for IPTV services following a user-centric context-aware approach through providing solutions for: i) Users identification during IPTV service access through a unique and fine-grained manner (different from the identification of the subscription which is the usual current case) based on employing a personal identifier for each user which is a part of the user context information. ii) Context-Aware IPTV service through proposing a context-aware system on top of the IPTV architecture for gathering in a dynamic and real-time manner the different context information related to the user, devices, network and service. The context information is gathered throughout the whole IPTV delivery chain considering the user domain, network provider domain, and service/content provider domain. The proposed context-aware system allows monitoring user s environment (devices and networks status), interpreting user s requirements and making the user s interaction with the TV system dynamic and transparent. iii) Personalized recommendation and selection of IPTV content based on the different context information gathered and the personalization decision taken by the context-aware system (different from the current recommendation approach mainly based on matching content to users preferences) which in turn highly improves the users Quality of Experience (QoE) and enriching the offers of IPTV servicesEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

Practical large-scale coordinated scheduling in LTE-Advanced networks

In LTE-Advanced, the same spectrum can be re-used in neighboring cells, hence coordinated scheduling is employed to improve the overall network performance (cell throughput, fairness, and energy efficiency) by reducing inter-cell interference. In this paper, we advocate that large-scale coordination can be obtained through a layered solution: a cluster of few (i.e., three) cells is coordinated at the first level, and clusters of coordinated cells are then coordinated at a larger scale (e.g., tens of cells). We model both small-scale coordination and large-scale coordination as optimization problems, show that solving them at optimality is prohibitive, and propose two efficient heuristics that achieve good results, and yet are simple enough to be run at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI). Detailed packet-level simulations show that our layered approach outperforms the existing ones, both static and dynamic

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges