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

Multihomed mobile network architecture

IP mobility ensures network reachability and session continuity while IPv6 networks are on the move. In the Network Mobility (NEMO) model, the potential for NEMO Mobile Routers (MRs) to interconnect and extend Internet connectivity allows the formation Nested NEMO networks. With MANEMO, nested MRs can be efficiently interconnected in a tree-based structure with Internet access being maintained via a designated Gateway. However, this only supports single-homed Internet connectivity. With the span of wireless access technologies and the popularity of multi-interfaced devices, multihoming support in this scenario becomes critical. A Nested Mobile Network with heterogeneous available Internet access options would allow better overall network performance and optimal utilisation of available resources. In this paper, we present the Multihomed Mobile Network Architecture (MMNA), a comprehensive multihomed mobility solution. It provides a multihoming management mechanism for Gateway Discovery and Selection on top of a multihomed mobility model integrating different mobility and multihoming protocols. It enables a complex nested multihomed topology to be established with multiple gateways supporting heterogeneous Internet access. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves better overall throughput, load sharing, and link failure recovery

Game theory for dynamic spectrum sharing cognitive radio

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University on 21 June 2010.‘Game Theory’ is the formal study of conflict and cooperation. The theory is based on a set of tools that have been developed in order to assist with the modelling and analysis of individual, independent decision makers. These actions potentially affect any decisions, which are made by other competitors. Therefore, it is well suited and capable of addressing the various issues linked to wireless communications. This work presents a Green Game-Based Hybrid Vertical Handover Model. The model is used for heterogeneous wireless networks, which combines both dynamic (Received Signal Strength and Node Mobility) and static (Cost, Power Consumption and Bandwidth) factors. These factors control the handover decision process; whereby the mechanism successfully eliminates any unnecessary handovers, reduces delay and overall number of handovers to 50% less and 70% less dropped packets and saves 50% more energy in comparison to other mechanisms. A novel Game-Based Multi-Interface Fast-Handover MIPv6 protocol is introduced in this thesis as an extension to the Multi-Interface Fast-handover MIPv6 protocol. The protocol works when the mobile node has more than one wireless interface. The protocol controls the handover decision process by deciding whether a handover is necessary and helps the node to choose the right access point at the right time. In addition, the protocol switches the mobile nodes interfaces ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ when needed to control the mobile node’s energy consumption and eliminate power lost of adding another interface. The protocol successfully reduces the number of handovers to 70%, 90% less dropped packets, 40% more received packets and acknowledgments and 85% less end-to-end delay in comparison to other Protocols. Furthermore, the thesis adapts a novel combination of both game and auction theory in dynamic resource allocation and price-power-based routing in wireless Ad-Hoc networks. Under auction schemes, destinations nodes bid the information data to access to the data stored in the server node. The server will allocate the data to the winner who values it most. Once the data has been allocated to the winner, another mechanism for dynamic routing is adopted. The routing mechanism is based on the source-destination cooperation, power consumption and source-compensation to the intermediate nodes. The mechanism dramatically increases the seller’s revenue to 50% more when compared to random allocation scheme and briefly evaluates the reliability of predefined route with respect to data prices, source and destination cooperation for different network settings. Last but not least, this thesis adjusts an adaptive competitive second-price pay-to-bid sealed auction game and a reputation-based game. This solves the fairness problems associated with spectrum sharing amongst one primary user and a large number of secondary users in a cognitive radio environment. The proposed games create a competition between the bidders and offers better revenue to the players in terms of fairness to more than 60% in certain scenarios. The proposed game could reach the maximum total profit for both primary and secondary users with better fairness; this is illustrated through numerical results

State-of-the-Art Multihoming Protocols and Support for Android

Il traguardo più importante per la connettività wireless del futuro sarà sfruttare appieno le potenzialità offerte da tutte le interfacce di rete dei dispositivi mobili. Per questo motivo con ogni probabilità il multihoming sarà un requisito obbligatorio per quelle applicazioni che puntano a fornire la migliore esperienza utente nel loro utilizzo. Sinteticamente è possibile definire il multihoming come quel processo complesso per cui un end-host o un end-site ha molteplici punti di aggancio alla rete. Nella pratica, tuttavia, il multihoming si è rivelato difficile da implementare e ancor di più da ottimizzare. Ad oggi infatti, il multihoming è lontano dall’essere considerato una feature standard nel network deployment nonostante anni di ricerche e di sviluppo nel settore, poiché il relativo supporto da parte dei protocolli è quasi sempre del tutto inadeguato. Naturalmente anche per Android in quanto piattaforma mobile più usata al mondo, è di fondamentale importanza supportare il multihoming per ampliare lo spettro delle funzionalità offerte ai propri utenti. Dunque alla luce di ciò, in questa tesi espongo lo stato dell’arte del supporto al multihoming in Android mettendo a confronto diversi protocolli di rete e testando la soluzione che sembra essere in assoluto la più promettente: LISP. Esaminato lo stato dell’arte dei protocolli con supporto al multihoming e l’architettura software di LISPmob per Android, l’obiettivo operativo principale di questa ricerca è duplice: a) testare il roaming seamless tra le varie interfacce di rete di un dispositivo Android, il che è appunto uno degli obiettivi del multihoming, attraverso LISPmob; e b) effettuare un ampio numero di test al fine di ottenere attraverso dati sperimentali alcuni importanti parametri relativi alle performance di LISP per capire quanto è realistica la possibilità da parte dell’utente finale di usarlo come efficace soluzione multihoming

Quality management of surveillance multimedia streams via federated SDN controllers in Fiwi-iot integrated deployment environments

Traditionally, hybrid optical-wireless networks (Fiber-Wireless - FiWi domain) and last-mile Internet of Things edge networks (Edge IoT domain) have been considered independently, with no synergic management solutions. On the one hand, FiWi has primarily focused on high-bandwidth and low-latency access to cellular-equipped nodes. On the other hand, Edge IoT has mainly aimed at effective dispatching of sensor/actuator data among (possibly opportunistic) nodes, by using direct peer-to-peer and base station (BS)-assisted Internet communications. The paper originally proposes a model and an architecture that loosely federate FiWi and Edge IoT domains based on the interaction of FiWi and Edge IoT software defined networking controllers: The primary idea is that our federated controllers can seldom exchange monitoring data and control hints the one with the other, thus mutually enhancing their capability of end-to-end quality-aware packet management. To show the applicability and the effectiveness of the approach, our original proposal is applied to the notable example of multimedia stream provisioning from surveillance cameras deployed in the Edge IoT domain to both an infrastructure-side server and spontaneously interconnected mobile smartphones; our solution is able to tune the BS behavior of the FiWi domain and to reroute/prioritize traffic in the Edge IoT domain, with the final goal to reduce latency. In addition, the reported application case shows the capability of our solution of joint and coordinated exploitation of resources in FiWi and Edge IoT domains, with performance results that highlight its benefits in terms of efficiency and responsiveness

MROM scheme to improve handoff performance in mobile networks

Mobile Router (MR) mobility supported by Network Mobility Basic Support Protocol (NEMO BS) is a Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) extension that supports Host Mobility. Proposed Multihoming and Route Optimization for MANEMO (MROM) scheme is designed to provide Route Optimization (RO) and Multihomed in NEMO architectures. This paper proposes two novel schemes; MANEMO routing scheme and Multihoming-based scheme. These are to provide support for next generation networks. The proposed MROM scheme differs from other schemes for NEMO environment because it considers the requirements of more application flows parameters as packet lost delivery, handoff delay as well as throughput). Another difference is that not only the network infrastructure can begin the functionality of flow routing, but also an Edge Mobile Router (EMR) can do this flow for routing. Moreover, it utilizes the state of the art and presently active access network to perform the separation of each flow in mobile network. Thus, proposed MROM exhibits multihoming features and improves handoff performance by initiating flow-based fast registration process in NEMO environment. A handoff method is proposed with enhanced functionalities of the Local Mobility Anchors (LMA), Mobile Routers (MRs) and signaling messages with a view to achieve continuous connectivity through handoff in NEMO. Both analytical and simulation approaches are used. Analytical evaluation is carried out to analyze packet delivery lost and handoff delay of our proposed scheme. It was also shown that cost of signaling messages and packet delivery are contributing to total handoff cost. At the simulation part, network simulator 3 (NS 3) has been used as the tool to get performance metrics that have been considered like packet delivery ratio, handoff delay, and packet loss. Our proposed scheme (MROM) has been benchmarking to the standard NEMO BS Protocol and P-NEMO. In this paper, we discuss proposed MROM for next generation networks, providing detailed analysis with a numerical model, proposed MROM, by maximizing the handoff performance, has been justified to have better mobility support than the ordinary NEMO BS Protocol and PNEMO. Keywords—MROM, MANEMO, RO, Multihomed, Handoff

IP Flow Mobility support for Proxy Mobile IPv6 based networks

The ability of offloading selected IP data traffic from 3G to WLAN access networks is considered a key feature in the upcoming 3GPP specifications, being the main goal to alleviate data congestion in celular networks while delivering a positive user experience. Lately, the 3GPP has adopted solutions that enable mobility of IP-based wireless devices relocating mobility functions from the terminal to the network. To this end, the IETF has standardized Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), a protocol capable to hide often complex mobility procedures from the mobile devices. This thesis, in line with the mentioned offload requirement, further extends Proxy Mobile IPv6 to support dynamic IP flow mobility management across access wireless networks according to operator policies. In this work, we assess the feasibility of the proposed solution and provide an experimental analysis based on a prototype network setup, implementing the PMIPv6 protocol and the related enhancements for flow mobility support. *** La capacità di spostare flussi IP da una rete di accesso 3G ad una di tipo WLAN è considerata una caratteristica chiave nelle specifiche future di 3GPP, essendo il principale metodo per alleviare la congestione nelle reti cellulari mantenendo al contempo una ragionevole qualità percepita dall'utente. Recentemente, 3GPP ha adottato soluzioni di mobilità per dispositivi con accesso radio basato su IP, traslando le funzioni di supporto dal terminale alla rete, e, a questo scopo, IETF ha standardizzato Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), un protocollo studiato per nascondere le procedure di mobilità ai sistemi mobili. Questa tesi, in linea con la citata esigenza di spostare flussi IP, estende ulteriormente PMIPv6 per consentire il supporto alla mobilità di flussi tra diverse reti di accesso wireless, assecondando le regole e/o politiche definite da un operatore. In questo lavoro, ci proponiamo di asserire la fattibilità della soluzione proposta, fornendo un'analisi sperimentale di essa sulla base di un prototipo di rete che implementa il protocollo PMIPv6 e le relative migliorie per il supporto alla mobilità di flussiope