Smart PIN: utility-based replication and delivery of multimedia content to mobile users in wireless networks

Next generation wireless networks rely on heterogeneous connectivity technologies to support various rich media services such as personal information storage, file sharing and multimedia streaming. Due to users’ mobility and dynamic characteristics of wireless networks, data availability in collaborating devices is a critical issue. In this context Smart PIN was proposed as a personal information network which focuses on performance of delivery and cost efficiency. Smart PIN uses a novel data replication scheme based on individual and overall system utility to best balance the requirements for static data and multimedia content delivery with variable device availability due to user mobility. Simulations show improved results in comparison with other general purpose data replication schemes in terms of data availability

Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks

The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs, eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin

Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

Trade & Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link

We propose Trade & Cap (T&C), an economics-inspired mechanism that incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring efficient resource utilization. Under T&C, rather than acting as an arbiter, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that resource. Our T&C mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first, software agents acting on behalf of users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary, interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market prices" – both of which are determined by the results of the trading phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our T&C mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient features of an efficient implementation architecture.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, and CNS-0520166); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología “Francisco Jose ́ de Caldas”

An Effective Peer to Peer Video Sharing Scheme with Social Reciprocity

Online video sharing and social networking are self-fertilizing speedily in today’s Internet. Online social network users are flooding more video contents among each other. A fascinating development as it is, the operational challenge in previous video streaming systems persists, i.e., the large server load required for topping of the systems. Exploring the unique advantages of a social networking based video streaming system; it advocate utilizing social reciprocities among peers with social relationships for efficient involvement incentivization and development, so as to enable high quality video streaming with low server cost. Then why only video: because more people prefer watching videos. Videos induce people to stay longer on websites. People remember videos. It achievement social reciprocity with two give-and-take ratios at each peer: (1) peer contribution ratio (PCR), which calculates the reciprocity level between a couple of social friends, and (2) system contribution ratio (SCR), which records the give-and-take level of the user to & from the entire system. It expect efficient Peer to Peer mechanisms for video streaming using the two ratios, where each user optimally chooses which other users to seek relay help from and help in relaying video streams, respectively, based on combined evaluations of their social relationship and historical reciprocity levels. This design helps to gain effective incentives for resource contribution, load balancing among relay peers, and efficient social-aware resource scheduling, security to the videos and high prefetching accuracy. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15071

Smart PIN: performance and cost-oriented context-aware personal information network

The next generation of networks will involve interconnection of heterogeneous individual networks such as WPAN, WLAN, WMAN and Cellular network, adopting the IP as common infrastructural protocol and providing virtually always-connected network. Furthermore, there are many devices which enable easy acquisition and storage of information as pictures, movies, emails, etc. Therefore, the information overload and divergent content’s characteristics make it difficult for users to handle their data in manual way. Consequently, there is a need for personalised automatic services which would enable data exchange across heterogeneous network and devices. To support these personalised services, user centric approaches for data delivery across the heterogeneous network are also required. In this context, this thesis proposes Smart PIN - a novel performance and cost-oriented context-aware Personal Information Network. Smart PIN's architecture is detailed including its network, service and management components. Within the service component, two novel schemes for efficient delivery of context and content data are proposed: Multimedia Data Replication Scheme (MDRS) and Quality-oriented Algorithm for Multiple-source Multimedia Delivery (QAMMD). MDRS supports efficient data accessibility among distributed devices using data replication which is based on a utility function and a minimum data set. QAMMD employs a buffer underflow avoidance scheme for streaming, which achieves high multimedia quality without content adaptation to network conditions. Simulation models for MDRS and QAMMD were built which are based on various heterogeneous network scenarios. Additionally a multiple-source streaming based on QAMMS was implemented as a prototype and tested in an emulated network environment. Comparative tests show that MDRS and QAMMD perform significantly better than other approaches

Enhanced Multimedia Exchanges over the Internet

Although the Internet was not originally designed for exchanging multimedia streams, consumers heavily depend on it for audiovisual data delivery. The intermittent nature of multimedia traffic, the unguaranteed underlying communication infrastructure, and dynamic user behavior collectively result in the degradation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE) perceived by end-users. Consequently, the volume of signalling messages is inevitably increased to compensate for the degradation of the desired service qualities. Improved multimedia services could leverage adaptive streaming as well as blockchain-based solutions to enhance media-rich experiences over the Internet at the cost of increased signalling volume. Many recent studies in the literature provide signalling reduction and blockchain-based methods for authenticated media access over the Internet while utilizing resources quasi-efficiently. To further increase the efficiency of multimedia communications, novel signalling overhead and content access latency reduction solutions are investigated in this dissertation including: (1) the first two research topics utilize steganography to reduce signalling bandwidth utilization while increasing the capacity of the multimedia network; and (2) the third research topic utilizes multimedia content access request management schemes to guarantee throughput values for servicing users, end-devices, and the network. Signalling of multimedia streaming is generated at every layer of the communication protocol stack; At the highest layer, segment requests are generated, and at the lower layers, byte tracking messages are exchanged. Through leveraging steganography, essential signalling information is encoded within multimedia payloads to reduce the amount of resources consumed by non-payload data. The first steganographic solution hides signalling messages within multimedia payloads, thereby freeing intermediate node buffers from queuing non-payload packets. Consequently, source nodes are capable of delivering control information to receiving nodes at no additional network overhead. A utility function is designed to minimize the volume of overhead exchanged while minimizing visual artifacts. Therefore, the proposed scheme is designed to leverage the fidelity of the multimedia stream to reduce the largest amount of control overhead with the lowest negative visual impact. The second steganographic solution enables protocol translation through embedding packet header information within payload data to alternatively utilize lightweight headers. The protocol translator leverages a proposed utility function to enable the maximum number of translations while maintaining QoS and QoE requirements in terms of packet throughput and playback bit-rate. As the number of multimedia users and sources increases, decentralized content access and management over a blockchain-based system is inevitable. Blockchain technologies suffer from large processing latencies; consequently reducing the throughput of a multimedia network. Reducing blockchain-based access latencies is therefore essential to maintaining a decentralized scalable model with seamless functionality and efficient utilization of resources. Adapting blockchains to feeless applications will then port the utility of ledger-based networks to audiovisual applications in a faultless manner. The proposed transaction processing scheme will enable ledger maintainers in sustaining desired throughputs necessary for delivering expected QoS and QoE values for decentralized audiovisual platforms. A block slicing algorithm is designed to ensure that the ledger maintenance strategy is benefiting the operations of the blockchain-based multimedia network. Using the proposed algorithm, the throughput and latency of operations within the multimedia network are then maintained at a desired level