Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Delivery of Personalized and Adaptive Content to Mobile Devices:A Framework and Enabling Technology

Many innovative wireless applications that aim to provide mobile information access are emerging. Since people have different information needs and preferences, one of the challenges for mobile information systems is to take advantage of the convenience of handheld devices and provide personalized information to the right person in a preferred format. However, the unique features of wireless networks and mobile devices pose challenges to personalized mobile content delivery. This paper proposes a generic framework for delivering personalized and adaptive content to mobile users. It introduces a variety of enabling technologies and highlights important issues in this area. The framework can be applied to many applications such as mobile commerce and context-aware mobile services

A personalized system for scalable distribution of multimedia content in multicast wireless networks

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2139-3This paper presents a novel architecture for scalable multimedia content delivery over wireless networks. The architecture takes into account both the user preferences and context in order to provide personalized contents to each user. In this way, third-party applications filter the most appropriate contents for each client in each situation. One of the key characteristics of the proposal is the scalability, which is provided, apart from the use of filtering techniques, through the transmission in multicast networks. In this sense, content delivery is carried out by means of the FLUTE (File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) protocol, which provides reliability in unidirectional environments through different mechanisms such as AL-FEC (Application Layer Forward Error Correction) codes, used in this paper. Another key characteristic is the context-awareness and personalization of content delivery, which is provided by means of context information, user profiles, and adaptation. The system proposed is validated through several empirical studies. Specifically, the paper presents evaluations of two types that collect objective and subjective measures. The first evaluate the efficiency of the transmission protocol, analyzing how the use of appropriate transmission parameters reduces the download time (and thus increasing the Quality of Experience), which can be minimized by using caching techniques. On the other hand, the subjective measures present a study about the user experience after testing the application and analyze the accuracy of the filtering process/strategy. Results show that using AL-FEC mechanisms produces download times until four times lower than when no protection is used. Also, results prove that there is a code rate that minimizes the download time depending on the losses and that, in general, code rates 0.7 and 0.9 provide good download times for a wide range of losses. On the other hand, subjective measures indicate a high user satisfaction (more than 80 %) and a relevant degree of accuracy of the content adaption.This work is supported in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Government of Spain under project COMINN (IPT-2012-0883-430000) and by the project PAID/2012/313 from the PAID-05-12 program of the Vicerrectorado de Investigacion of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.De Fez Lava, I.; Gil Pascual, M.; Fons Cors, JJ.; Guerri Cebollada, JC.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2014). A personalized system for scalable distribution of multimedia content in multicast wireless networks. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2139-3S127AdAdge (2013) A majority of U.S. mobile users are now smartphone users. Available at: http://adage.com/article/digital/a-majority-u-s-mobile-users-smartphone-users/241717 . Accessed November 2013Adomavicius G, Tuzhilin E (2005) Toward the next generation of recommender Systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 17:734–749Adomavicius G, Tuzhilin A (2010) Context-aware recommender systems. Recommender Systems Handbook (Chapter 7): 217–253Androjena, Jena Android Porting (2013). Available at: https://code.google.com/p/androjena . Accessed December 2013Anind KD (2001) Understanding and Using Context. Personal Ubiquitous Comput 5:4–7Assad M, Carmichael DJ, Kay J, Kummerfeld B (2007) PersonisAD: distributed, active, scrutable model framework for context-aware services. Proc. of Pervasive Computing, Toronto, Canada:55–72Bai H, Atiquzzaman M (2003) Error modeling schemes for fading channels in wireless communications: a survey. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials 5(2):2–9Baldauf M, Dustdar S, Rosenberg F (2007) A survey on context-aware systems. Int. J. AdHoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Springer-Verlag 2:263–277Barquero D, Bria A (2007) Forward Error Correction file delivery in DVB-H. Proc. of IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC), Dublin, Ireland:2951–2955Bright A, Kay J, Ler D, Ngo K, Niu W, Nuguid A (2005) Adaptively recommending museum tours. Proc. of the UbiComp Workshop on Smart Environments and their Applications to Cultural Heritage, Tokyo, Japan:29–32Chatfield C, Carmichael D, Hexel R, Kay J, Kummerfeld B (2005) Personalisation in intelligent environments: managing the information flow. Proc. of the OZCHI Computer-human interaction, Canberra, Australia:1–10Chen YFR, Jana R, Stern D, Wei B, Yang M, Sun H, Dyaberi J (2010) Zebroid: using IPTV data to support STB-assisted VoD content delivery. Multimedia System Journal 16(3):199–214Chen G, Kotz D (2000) A survey on context-aware mobile computing research. Technical Report TR2000-381, Dartmouth Computer ScienceCommunity Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) – Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Available at: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html . Accesed October 2013de Fez I, Fraile F, Belda R, Guerri JC (2011) Performance evaluation of AL-FEC LDPC codes for push content applications in wireless unidirectional environments. Multimedia Tools and Applications 60(3):669–688de Fez I, Fraile F, Belda R, Guerri JC (2012) Analysis and evaluation of adaptive LDPC AL-FEC codes for content download services. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 14(3):641–650de Fez I, Fraile F, Guerri JC (2013) Effect of the FDT transmission frequency for an optimum content delivery using the FLUTE protocol. Computer Communications 36(12):1298–1309de Fez I, Guerri JC (2014) An adaptive mechanism for optimal content download in wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 16(4):1140–1155Du R, Safavi-Naini R, Susilo W (2003) Web filtering using text classification (2003). Proc. of the Int Conf on Networks (ICON), Sydney, Australia:325–330ETSI TS 102 034 (2008), Transport of MPEG-2 TS Based DVB Services over IP based Networks (and associated XML), v1.4.1, available online: www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102000_102099/102034/01.04.01_60/ts_102034v010401p.pdfETSI TS 102 472 (2009), Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); IP Datacast over DVB-H: Content Delivery Protocols, v1.3.1, available online: www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/102400_102499/102472/01.03.01_60/ts_102472v010301p.pdfETSI TS 126 346 (2013), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS); LTE; Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS); Protocols and codecs (release 10), v11.3.0, available online: www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/126300_126399/126346/11.03.00_60/ts_126346v110300p.pdfFelfernig A, Jeran M, Ninaus G, Reinfrank F, Reiterer S (2013) Toward the next generation of recommender systems: applications and research challenges. Multimedia Services in Intelligent Environments 24 (Chapter 5): 81–98Fraile F, de Fez I, Guerri JC (2009) Modela-TV: service personalization and business model management for mobile TV. Proc. of 7th European Interactive TV Conference (EuroITV), Leuven, Belgium:1–6Fraile F, de Fez I, Guerri JC (2014) Evaluation of background push content download services to mobile devices over DVB networks. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting 60(1):1–15Gallager RG (1962) Low density parity check codes. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 8(1):21–28Gil M, Giner P, Pelechano V (2012) Personalization for unobtrusive service interaction. Personal Ubiquitous Comput 16(5):543–561Guillen J, Miranda J, Berrocal J, Garcia-Alonso J, Murillo J, Canal C (2014) People as a service: a mobile-centric model for providing collective sociological profiles. IEEE Software 31(2):48–53Hrvoje J, Stockhammer T, Xu W, Abdel Samad W (2006) Efficient video-on-demand services over mobile datacast channels. Journal of Zhejiang University 7(5):873–884Hsieh CC, Lin CH, Chang WT (2009) Design and implementation of the interactive multimedia broadcasting services in DVB-H. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 55(4):1779–1787Kellerer H, Pferschy U, Pisinger D (2004) Knapsack problems. SpringerKorpipaa P, Malm EJ, Rantakokko T, Kyllonen V, Kela J, Mantyjarvi J, Hakkila J, Kansala I (2006) Customizing user interaction in smart phones. IEEE Pervasive Computing 5:82–90Kuppusamy KS, Aghila G (2012) A personalized web page content filtering model based on segmentation. Int Journal of Information Sciences and Techniques (IJIST) 2(1):41–51Kutscher D, Greifenberg J, Loos K (2007) Scalable DTN distribution over uni-directional links. Proc. of the SIGCOMM workshop on networked systems in developing regions (NSDR), Kyoto, Japan: article no. 6Lewis JR (1995) Ibm computer usability satisfaction questionnaires: psychometric evaluation and instructions for use. Int J Hum Comput Interact 7(1):57–78Liang L, Cruichkshank H, Sun Z, Kulatunga C, Fairhurst G (2010) The integration of TESLA and FLUTE over satellite networks. Proc. of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (Globecom), Miami, FL, USA:1–6Lohmar T, Huschke J (2009) Radio resource optimization for MBMS file transmissions. Proc. of the IEEE Int Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting (BMSB), Bilbao, Spain:1–7Neumann C, Roca V, Walsh R (2005) Large scale content distribution protocols. ACM Computer Communication Review 35(5):85–92Paila T, Walsh R, Luby M, Roca V, Lehtonen R (2012) FLUTE – File Delivery Over Unidirectional Transport. IETF RFC 6726Paolini E, Varrella M, Chiani M, Matuz B, Liva G (2008) Low-complexity LDPC codes with near-optimum performance over the BEC. Proc. Adv Satellite Mobile Systems (ASMS), Bologna, Italy:274–282Papastergiou G, Psaras I, Tsaoussidis V (2009) Deep-space transport protocol: a novel transport scheme for space DTNs. Computer Communications 32(16):1757–1767Peltotalo J, Harju J, Saukko M, Väätämöinen L, Bouazizi I, Curcio I (2008) Personal mobile broadcasting based on the 3GPP MBMS System. Proc. of MoMM, Linz, Austria:156–162Peltotalo J, Peltotalo S, Harju J, Walsh R (2007) Performance analysis of a file delivery system based on the FLUTE protocol. Int Journal of Communication Systems 20(6):633–659Podlipnig S, Böszörmenyi L (2003) A survey of web cache replacement strategies. ACM Computing Surveys 35(4):374–398Roca V, Neumann C, Furodet D (2008) Low density parity check (LDPC) staircase and triangle forward error correction (FEC) schemes. IETF RFC 5170Runeson P, Höst M (2009) Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empir Softw Eng 14(2):131–164Schiller JH, Voisard A (2004) Location-based services. Kaufmann, MorganSerral E, Gil M, Valderas P, Pelechano V (2013) Automating unobtrusive personalized services in ambient media environments. Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer US, available online, doi: 10.1007/s11042-013-1634-2Serral E, Valderas P, Pelechano V (2010) Towards the model driven development of context-aware pervasive systems. Pervasive and Mobile Computing 6(2):254–280Streefkerk JW, van Esch-Bussemakers MP, Neerincx MA (2006) Designing personal attentive user interfaces in the mobile public safety domain. Comput Hum Behav 22:749–770Valtonen M, Vainio AM, Vanhala J (2009) Proactive and adaptive fuzzy profile control for mobile phones. Proc. of the IEEE Int Conf on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), Galveston, Texas, USA:1–3van Woensel W, Gil M, Casteleyn S, Serral E, Pelechano V (2012) Adapting the obtrusiveness of service interactions in dynamically discovered environments. Proc. of MobiQuitous, Beijing, China:250–262W3C (2012), OWL 2Web Ontology Language Document Overview, Recommendation 11. Available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview. Accesed: November 2013Weld DS, Anderson C, Domingos P, Etzioni O, Gajos K, Lau T, Wolf S (2003) Automatically personalizing user interfaces. Proc. of the Int Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Acapulco, Mexico:1613–1619Xu J, Hu Q, Lee W, Lee DL (2004) Performance evaluation of an optimal cache replacement policy for wireless data dissemination. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 16(1):125–139Yetgin Z, Çelik T (2012) Efficient progressive downloading over multimedia broadcast multicast service. Computer Networks 56(2):533–547Zheng Q, Zhu P, Wang Y, Xu M (2010) EPSP: Enhancing network protocol with social-aware plane. Proc. of IEEE/ACM Int Conference on Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and Int Conference on Cyber, Ohysical and Social Computing (CPSCom), Hangzhou, China:578–58

HbbTV-compliant Platform for Hybrid Media Delivery and Synchronization on Single- and Multi-Device Scenarios

[EN] The combination of broadcast and broadband (hybrid) technologies for delivering TV related media contents can bring fascinating opportunities. It is motivated by the large amount and diversity of media contents, together with the ubiquity and multiple connectivity capabilities of modern consumption devices. This paper presents an end-to-end platform for the preparation, delivery, and synchronized consumption of related hybrid (broadcast/broadband) media contents on a single device and/or on multiple close-by devices (i.e., a multi-device scenario). It is compatible with the latest version of the Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) standard (version 2.0.1). Additionally, it provides adaptive and efficient solutions for key issues not specified in that standard, but that are necessary to successfully deploy hybrid and multidevice media services. Moreover, apart from MPEG-DASH and HTML5, which are the broadband technologies adopted by HbbTV, the platform also provides support for using HTTP Live Streaming and Real-time Transport Protocol and its companion RTP Control Protocol broadband technologies. The presented platform can provide support for many hybrid media services. In this paper, in order to evaluate it, the use case of multi-device and multi-view TV service has been selected. The results of both objective and subjective assessments have been very satisfactory, in terms of performance (stability, smooth playout, delays, and sync accuracy), usability of the platform, usefulness of its functionalities, and the awaken interest in these kinds of platforms.This work was supported in part by the "Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional" and in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through R&D&I Support Program under Grant TEC2013-45492-R.Boronat, F.; Marfil-Reguero, D.; Montagud, M.; Pastor Castillo, FJ. (2017). HbbTV-compliant Platform for Hybrid Media Delivery and Synchronization on Single- and Multi-Device Scenarios. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBC.2017.2781124S12

Dynamic and Super-Personalized Media Ecosystem Driven by Generative AI: Unpredictable Plays Never Repeating The Same

This paper introduces a media service model that exploits artificial intelligence (AI) video generators at the receive end. This proposal deviates from the traditional multimedia ecosystem, completely relying on in-house production, by shifting part of the content creation onto the receiver. We bring a semantic process into the framework, allowing the distribution network to provide service elements that prompt the content generator, rather than distributing encoded data of fully finished programs. The service elements include fine-tailored text descriptions, lightweight image data of some objects, or application programming interfaces, comprehensively referred to as semantic sources, and the user terminal translates the received semantic data into video frames. Empowered by the random nature of generative AI, the users could then experience super-personalized services accordingly. The proposed idea incorporates the situations in which the user receives different service providers' element packages; a sequence of packages over time, or multiple packages at the same time. Given promised in-context coherence and content integrity, the combinatory dynamics will amplify the service diversity, allowing the users to always chance upon new experiences. This work particularly aims at short-form videos and advertisements, which the users would easily feel fatigued by seeing the same frame sequence every time. In those use cases, the content provider's role will be recast as scripting semantic sources, transformed from a thorough producer. Overall, this work explores a new form of media ecosystem facilitated by receiver-embedded generative models, featuring both random content dynamics and enhanced delivery efficiency simultaneously.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Determining the feasibility of a method for improving bandwidth utilization of cable networks

While the cable television industry has made significant investments in infrastructure to improve the number and quality of services delivered to their end customers, they still face the problem of limited bandwidth of signals down the last mile of coaxial cable to the subscriber premises. This thesis investigates an approach devised by the author to overcome this limitation. The method involves clustering of channels in both the upstream and downstream directions in a DOCSIS compliant cable system. A model of this approach is made and the theoretical maximum throughput is calculated for several scenarios. Results are compared to performance of existing systems. It is found that proposed approach yields significantly more throughput for a given RF bandwidth than others in the comparison

Serviços multimédia multicast de próxima geração

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesUma das mais recentes conquistas na evolução móvel foi o 3G, permitindo o acesso a serviços multimédia com qualidade de serviço assegurada. No entanto, a tecnologia UMTS, tal como definida na sua Release ’99, é apenas capaz de transmitir em modo unicast, sendo manifestamente ineficiente para comunicações multimédia almejando grupos de utilizadores. A tecnologia IMS surge na Release 5 do 3GPP que começou a responder já a algumas necessidades, permitindo comunicações sobre IP oferecendo serviços Internet a qualquer momento e em qualquer lugar sobre tecnologias de comunicação móveis fornecendo pela primeira vez sessões multimédia satisfatórias. A Release 6 por sua vez trouxe a tecnologia MBMS que permite transmissões em broadcast e multicast para redes móveis. O MBMS fornece os serviços de aplicações multimédia que todos estavam à espera, tanto para os utilizadores como para os prestadores de serviços. O operador pode agora fazer uso da tecnologia existente aumentando todo o tipo de benefícios no serviço prestado ao cliente. Com a possível integração destas duas tecnologias passa a ser possível desenvolver serviços assentes em redes convergentes em que os conteúdos são entregues usando tecnologias unicast, multicast ou broadcast. Neste contexto, o principal motivo deste trabalho consiste essencialmente em fazer uso dos recursos da rede terminando com o desperdício dos mesmos e aumentando a eficiência dos serviços através da integração das tecnologias IMS e MBMS. O trabalho realizado começa com o estudo do estado da arte das telecomunicações móveis com referência às tecnologias referidas, seguindo-se a apresentação da possível integração IMS-MBMS e terminando com o projecto de uma plataforma de demonstração que no futuro possa ser uma implementação de serviço multimédia multicast. O objectivo principal é mostrar os benefícios de um serviço que era normalmente executado em unicast relativamente ao modo multicast, fazendo uso da nova convergência de tecnologias IMS e MBMS. Na conclusão do trabalho são referidas as vantagens do uso de portadoras multicast e broadcast, tendo como perspectiva de que este trabalho possa ser um ponto de partida para um novo conjunto de serviços poupando recursos de rede e permitindo uma eficiência considerável em serviços inovadores.3G is bang up to date in the mobile phone industry. It allows access to multimedia services and gives a guarantee of quality of service. The UMTS technology, defined in 3GPP Release ’99, provides an unicast transmission, but it is completely inefficient when it comes to multimedia group communications. The IMS technology first appeared in Release 5 that has already started to consider the interests of the clients. It provides communications over IP, offering Internet services anytime, anywhere on mobile communication technologies. Also, it offers for the first time satisfactory multimedia sessions. On the other hand, Release 6 gave rise to the MBMS technology that provides broadcast and multicast transmissions for mobile networks. The MBMS provides multimedia applications services that everyone was waiting, including users and service providers. Now the operator makes use of existing technology in order to provide better costumer services. The possible integration of these two technologies will contribute to develop services based on converged networks in which contents are delivered through the unicast, multicast or broadcast technologies. Therefore, the objective of this work is basically to make use of network resources avoiding wastes and improving customer services through the integration of the IMS and the MBMS technologies. The executed work starts with the mobile telecommunications state of the art with reference to the referred technologies, followed by the IMS-MBMS convergence presentation and finishing with the proposal for implementation of a service platform that can be used for a multimedia multicast service. The main point is to show the benefits of a service that has been normally executed in unicast mode over the multicast mode, making use of the new IMS and MBMS technologies integration. To closure the work it is referred the advantages to use multicast and broadcast bearers, with the perspective that this work could be a starting point to a new set of services, saving network resources and allowing for innovate services a considerable efficency

VoIP security - attacks and solutions

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is being extensively and rapidly deployed. Flexibility and cost efficiency are the key factors luring enterprises to transition to VoIP. Some security problems may surface with the widespread deployment of VoIP. This article presents an overview of VoIP systems and its security issues. First, we briefly describe basic VoIP architecture and its fundamental differences compared to PSTN. Next, basic VoIP protocols used for signaling and media transport, as well as defense mechanisms are described. Finally, current and potential VoIP attacks along with the approaches that have been adopted to counter the attacks are discussed