Archiving and Delivery of 3DTI Rehabilitation Sessions

In this paper we present CyPhy: a cyber-physiotherapy system that brings daily rehabilitation to patient’s home with supervision from trained therapist. With its archiving and delivery features, CyPhy is able to 1) capture and record RGB-D and physiotherapy-related medical sensing data streams in home environment; 2) provide efficient storage for rehabilitation session recordings; 3) provide fast metadata analysis over stored sessions for review recommendation; 4) adaptively deliver rehabilitation session under different networking capabilities; 5) support smooth viewpoint changing during 3D video streaming with scene rendering schemes tailored for devices with different bandwidth and power limitations; and 6) provide platform-independent streaming client for various mobile and PC environments

Sl-EDGE: Network Slicing at the Edge

Network slicing of multi-access edge computing (MEC) resources is expected to be a pivotal technology to the success of 5G networks and beyond. The key challenge that sets MEC slicing apart from traditional resource allocation problems is that edge nodes depend on tightly-intertwined and strictly-constrained networking, computation and storage resources. Therefore, instantiating MEC slices without incurring in resource over-provisioning is hardly addressable with existing slicing algorithms. The main innovation of this paper is Sl-EDGE, a unified MEC slicing framework that allows network operators to instantiate heterogeneous slice services (e.g., video streaming, caching, 5G network access) on edge devices. We first describe the architecture and operations of Sl-EDGE, and then show that the problem of optimally instantiating joint network-MEC slices is NP-hard. Thus, we propose near-optimal algorithms that leverage key similarities among edge nodes and resource virtualization to instantiate heterogeneous slices 7.5x faster and within 0.25 of the optimum. We first assess the performance of our algorithms through extensive numerical analysis, and show that Sl-EDGE instantiates slices 6x more efficiently then state-of-the-art MEC slicing algorithms. Furthermore, experimental results on a 24-radio testbed with 9 smartphones demonstrate that Sl-EDGE provides at once highly-efficient slicing of joint LTE connectivity, video streaming over WiFi, and ffmpeg video transcoding

Architectures and Algorithms for Content Delivery in Future Networks

Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are less and less able to cope with today’s tremendous content growth. Enhancing infrastructures with storage and computation capabilities may help to remedy the situation. Information-Centric Networks (ICNs), a proposed future Internet technology, unlike the current Internet, decouple information from its sources and provide in-network storage. However, content delivery over in-network storage-enabled networks still faces significant issues, such as the stability and accuracy of estimated bitrate when using Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DASH). Still Implementing new infrastructures with in-network storage can lead to other challenges. For instance, the extensive deployment of such networks will require a significant upgrade of the installed IP infrastructure. Furthermore, network slicing enables services and applications with very different characteristics to co-exist on the same network infrastructure. Another challenge is that traditional architectures cannot meet future expectations for streaming in terms of latency and network load when it comes to content, such as 360° videos and immersive services. In-Network Computing (INC), also known as Computing in the Network (COIN), allows the computation tasks to be distributed across the network instead of being computed on servers to guarantee performance. INC is expected to provide lower latency, lower network traffic, and higher throughput. Implementing infrastructures with in-network computing will help fulfill specific requirements for streaming 360° video streaming in the future. Therefore, the delivery of 360° video and immersive services can benefit from INC. This thesis elaborates and addresses the key architectural and algorithmic research challenges related to content delivery in future networks. To tackle the first challenge, we propose algorithms for solving the inaccuracy of rate estimation for future CDNs implementation with in-network storage (a key feature of future networks). An algorithm for implementing in-network storage in IP settings for CDNs is proposed for the second challenge. Finally, for the third challenge, we propose an architecture for provisioning INC-enabled slices for 360° video streaming in next-generation networks. We considered a P4-enabled Software-Defined network (SDN) as the physical infrastructure and significantly reduced latency and traffic load for video streaming

Seamless Application Delivery Using Software Defined Exchanges

One of the main challenges in delivering content over the Internet today is the absence of a centralized monitoring and control system [38]. Software Defined Networking has paved the way to provide a much needed control over network traffic. OpenFlow is now being standardized as part of the Open Networking Foundation, and Software Defined Exchanges (SDXes) provide a framework to use OpenFlow for multi-domain routing. Prototype deployments of Software Defined Exchanges have recently come into existence as a platform for Future Internet Architecture to eliminate the need for core routing technology used in today’s Internet. In this work, we look at how application delivery, in particular, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and Nowcasting take advantage of a Software Defined Exchange. We compare unsophisticated controllers to more sophisticated ones which we call a ”load balancer” and find that implementing a good controller for inter-domain routing can result in better network utilization and application performance. We then design, develop and evaluate a prototype for a Content Distribution Network (CDN) that uses resources at SDXes to provide higher quality bitrates for a DASH client