A Network Algorithm for 3D/2D IPTV Distribution using WiMAX and WLAN Technologies

The final publication is available at link.springer.comThe appearance of new broadband wireless technologies jointly with the ability to offer enough quality of service to provide IPTV over them, have made possible the mobility and ubiquity of any type of device to access the IPTV network. The minimum bandwidth required in the access network to provide appropriate quality 3D/2D IPTV services jointly with the need to guarantee the Quality of Experience (QoE) to the end user, makes the need of algorithms that should be able to combine different wireless standards and technologies. In this paper, we propose a network algorithm that manages the IPTV access network and decides which type of wireless technology the customers should connect with when using multiband devices, depending on the requirements of the IPTV client device, the available networks, and some network parameters (such as the number of loss packets and packet delay), to provide the maximum QoE to the customer. The measurements taken in a real environment from several wireless networks allow us to know the performance of the proposed system when it selects each one of them. The measurements taken from a test bench demonstrate the success of our system.This work has been partially supported by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, though the PAID-15-10 multidisciplinary projects, by the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, and by National Funding from the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011 Project.Lloret, J.; Cánovas Solbes, A.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Lin, K. (2013). A Network Algorithm for 3D/2D IPTV Distribution using WiMAX and WLAN Technologies. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 67(1):7-30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0929-4S730671Abukharis S, MacKenzie R, Farrell TO (2009) Improving QoS of Video Transmitted Over 802.11 WLANs Using Frame Aggregation. London Communications Symposium.. London, United Kingdom, September 03–04Alejandro Canovas, Fernando Boronat, Carlos Turro and Jaime Lloret (2009) Multicast TV over WLAN in a University Campus Network, The Fifth International Conference on Networking and Services (ICNS 2009), Valencia (Spain), April 20–25Alfonsi B (2005) “I want my IPTV: Internet Protocol television predicted a winner,” IEEE Distributed Systems Online, vol.6, no.2Birlik F, Gurbuz Ö, Ercetin O (2009) IPTV Home Networking via 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks: An Implementation Experience. IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 55, No. 3Cai LX, Ling X, Shen X, Mark JW, Cai L (2009) Supporting voice and video applications over IEEE 802.11n WLANs. Wireless Networks 15:443–454Cunningham G, Perry P, Murphy J, Murphy L (2009) Seamless Handover of IPTV Streams in a Wireless LAN Network. Transactions on Broadcasting, IEEE 55(4):796–801Dai Z, Fracchia R, Gosteau J, Pellati P, Vivier G (2008) Vertical Handover Criteria and Algorithm in IEEE802.11 and 802.16 Hybrid Networks, IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2008. ICC’08. Beijing, China, 19–23Gidlund M, Ekling J (2008) VoIP and IPTV distribution over wireless mesh networks in indoor environment. IEEE Trans Consum Electron 54(4):1665–1671Hellberg C, Greene D, Boyes T (2007) Broadband network architectures: designing and deploying triple-play services. Prentice Hall PTR Upper Saddle River, NJ, USAHsu H-T, Kuo F-Y, Lu P-H (2010) Design of WiFi/WiMAX dual-band E-shaped patch antennas through cavity model approach. Microw Opt Technol Lett 52(2):471–474IEEE 802.11 Working Group, At http://www.ieee802.org/11/index.shtml [last access: July 2011]IEEE Std 802.11™-2007 - IEEE Standard for Information Technology— Telecommunications and information exchange between systems— Local and metropolitan area networks—Specific requirements Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) SpecificationsIEEE Std 802.16™-2009, IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks, Part 16: Air Interface for Broadband Wireless Access Systems. At http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.16-2009.pdf [last access: July 2011]inCode Telecom group Inc. (2006) The Quad-Play—the First Wave of the Converged Services Evolution. White paper, FebruaryIPTV Focus Group, Available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/IPTV/ [last access: July 2011]Jindal S, Jindal A, Gupta N (2005) Grouping WI-MAX, 3 G and WI-FI for wireless broadband, The First IEEE and IFIP International Conference in Central Asia on Internet 2005, September 26–29, Bishkek, KyrgyzstanJin-Yu Zhang, Man-Gui Liang (2008) “IPTV QoS Implement Mechanism in WLAN,” Int. Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. pp 117-120, 15–17Karen Fernanda Medina Velez and Ivonne Alexandra Revelo Arias (2006) Diseño y planificación de una red inalámbrica basada en los estandares IEEE 802.16 (WIMAX) y 802.11 (WIFI) para proveer de internet de banda ancha a poblaciones de las provincias de Loja y Zamora Chinchipe, Tesis Electrónica y Telecomunicaciones (IET), Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, EcuadorKnightson K, Morita N, Towle T (2005) NGN architecture: generic principles, functional architecture, and implementation. IEEE Commun Mag 43(10):49–56Lai C, Min Chen (2011) Playback-Rate Based Streaming Services for Maximum Network Capacity in IP Multimedia Subsystem, IEEE System Journal, doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2011.2165190Lee K-H, Trong ST, Lee B-G, Kim Y-T (2008) QoS-Guaranteed IPTV Service Provisioning in Home Network with IEEE 802.11e Wireless LAN,” IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium. pp 71-76Marcelo Atenas, Sandra Sendra, Miguel Garcia, Jaime Lloret (2010) IPTV Performance in IEEE 802.11n WLANs, IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE Globecomm 2010), Miami (USA), December 6–10Miguel Garcia, Jaime Lloret, Miguel Edo, Raquel Lacuesta (2009) IPTV Distribution Network Access System Using WiMAX and WLAN Technologies, International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2009), Munich (Germany), June 11–13Park AH, Choi JK (2007) “QoS guaranteed IPTV service over Wireless Broadband network”, The 9th Int. Conference on Advanced Communication Technology 2:1077–1080Retnasothie FE, Ozdemir MK, YÄucek T, Zhang J, Celebi H, Muththaiah R (2006) “Wireless IPTV over WiMAX: Challenges and applications”. IEEE Wamicon, Clearwater, FLSchollmeier G, Winkler C (2004) Providing sustainable QoS in next-generation networks. IEEE Communication Magazine 42(6):102–107She J, Hou F, Ho P-H, Xie L-L (2007) IPTV over WiMAX: Key Success Factors, Challenges, and Solutions [Advances in Mobile Multimedia]. IEEE Commun Mag 45(8):87–93Shihab E, Cai L, Wan F, Gulliver TA, Tin N (2008) Wireless mesh networks for in-home IPTV distribution. IEEE Netw 22(1):52–57Shihab E, Wan F, Cai L, Gulliver A, Tin N (2007) “Performance Analysis of IPTV in Home Networks”, IEEE Global Telecommunications (GLOBECOM 2007), Washington, DC, pp 26–30Singh H, ChangYeul Kvvon, Seong Soo Kim, Chiu Ngo (2008) “IPTV over WirelessLAN: Promises and Challenges,” 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, pp.626-631Super AG technologies, At http://www.digicom.it/italiano/supporto/WhitePaper/Wireless108M_whitepaper.pdf [last access: July 2011]VLC Media Player, Available at www.videolan.org [last access: July 2011]Wen-Hsing Kuo, Tehuang Liu, Wanjiun Liao (2007) Utility-Based Resource Allocation for Layer-Encoded IPTV Multicast in IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) Wireless Networks. IEEE International Conference on Communications 2007 (ICC 2007), 24–28. Glasgow, Scotland pp 1754-1759Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer, Available at www.wireshark.org [last access: July 2011]Xiao Y, Du X, Zhang J, Hu F, Guizani S (2007) Internet protocol television (IPTV): the killer application for the next-generation internet. IEEE Commun Mag 45(11):126–134Yarali A, Rahman S, Mbula B (2008) WIMAX: The innovate Broadband Wireless access technology. Journal of Communications 3(2):53–6

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2006

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Performance Prediction and Tuning for Symmetric Coexistence of WiFi and ZigBee Networks

Due to the explosive deployment of WiFi and ZigBee wireless networks, 2.4GHz ISM bands (2.4GHz-2.5GHz) are becoming increasingly crowded, and the co-channel coexistence of these two networks is inevitable. For coexistence networks, people always want to predict their performance (e.g. throughput, energy consumption, etc.) before deployment, or even want to tune parameters to compensate unnecessary performance degradation (owing to the huge differences between these two MAC protocols) or to satisfy some performance requirements (e.g., priority, delay constraint, etc.) of them. However, predicting and tuning performance of coexisting WiFi and ZigBee networks has been a challenging task, primarily due to the lack of corresponding simulators and analytical models. In this dissertation, we addressed the aforementioned problems by presenting simulators and models for the coexistence of WiFi and ZigBee devices. Specifically, based on the energy efficiency and traffic pattern of three practical coexistence scenarios: disaster rescue site, smart hospital and home automation. We first of all classify them into three classes, which are non-sleeping devices with saturated traffic (SAT), non-sleeping devices with unsaturated traffic (UNSAT) and duty-cycling devices with unsaturated traffic (DC-UNSAT). Then a simulator and an analytical model are proposed for each class, where each simulator is verified by simple hardware based experiment. Next, we derive the expressions for performance metrics like throughput, delay etc., and predict them using both the proposed simulator and the model. Due to the higher accuracy of the simulator, the results from them are used as the ground truth to validate the accuracy of the model. Last, according to some common performance tuning requirements for each class, we formulate them into optimization problems and propose the corresponding solving methods. The results show that the proposed simulators have high accuracy in performance prediction, while the models, although are less accurate than the former, can be used in fast prediction. In particular, the models can also be easily used in optimization problems for performance tuning, and the results prove its high efficiency

Cross-Layer Techniques for Efficient Medium Access in Wi-Fi Networks

IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless networks share the wireless medium using a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. The MAC protocol is a central determiner of Wi-Fi networks’ efficiency–the fraction of the capacity available in the physical layer that Wi-Fi-equipped hosts can use in practice. The MAC protocol’s design is intended to allow senders to share the wireless medium fairly while still allowing high utilisation. This thesis develops techniques that allow Wi-Fi senders to send more data using fewer medium acquisitions, reducing the overhead of idle periods, and thus improving end-to-end goodput. Our techniques address the problems we identify with Wi-Fi’s status quo. Today’s commodity Linux Wi-Fi/IP software stack and Wi-Fi cards waste medium acquisitions as they fail to queue enough packets that would allow for effective sending of multiple frames per wireless medium acquisition. In addition, for bi-directional protocols such as TCP, TCP data and TCP ACKs contend for the wireless channel, wasting medium acquisitions (and thus capacity). Finally, the probing mechanism used for bit-rate adaptation in Wi-Fi networks increases channel acquisition overhead. We describe the design and implementation of Aggregate Aware Queueing (AAQ), a fair queueing discipline, that coordinates scheduling of frame transmission with the aggregation layer in the Wi-Fi stack, allowing more frames per channel acquisition. Furthermore, we describe Hierarchical Acknowledgments (HACK) and Transmission Control Protocol Acknowledgment Optimisation (TAO), techniques that reduce channel acquisitions for TCP flows, further improving goodput. Finally, we design and implement Aggregate Aware Rate Control (AARC), a bit-rate adaptation algorithm that reduces channel acquisition overheads incurred by the probing mechanism common in today’s commodity Wi-Fi systems. We implement our techniques on real Wi-Fi hardware to demonstrate their practicality, and measure their performance on real testbeds, using off-the-shelf commodity Wi-Fi hardware where possible, and software-defined radio hardware for those techniques that require modification of the Wi-Fi implementation unachievable on commodity hardware. The techniques described in this thesis offer up to 2x aggregate goodput improvement compared to the stock Linux Wi-Fi stack

A survey of flooding, gossip routing, and related schemes for wireless multi- hop networks

Flooding is an essential and critical service in computer networks that is used by many routing protocols to send packets from a source to all nodes in the network. As the packets are forwarded once by each receiving node, many copies of the same packet traverse the network which leads to high redundancy and unnecessary usage of the sparse capacity of the transmission medium. Gossip routing is a well-known approach to improve the flooding in wireless multi-hop networks. Each node has a forwarding probability p that is either statically per-configured or determined by information that is available at runtime, e.g, the node degree. When a packet is received, the node selects a random number r. If the number r is below p, the packet is forwarded and otherwise, in the most simple gossip routing protocol, dropped. With this approach the redundancy can be reduced while at the same time the reachability is preserved if the value of the parameter p (and others) is chosen with consideration of the network topology. This technical report gives an overview of the relevant publications in the research domain of gossip routing and gives an insight in the improvements that can be achieved. We discuss the simulation setups and results of gossip routing protocols as well as further improved flooding schemes. The three most important metrics in this application domain are elaborated: reachability, redundancy, and management overhead. The published studies used simulation environments for their research and thus the assumptions, models, and parameters of the simulations are discussed and the feasibility of an application for real world wireless networks are highlighted. Wireless mesh networks based on IEEE 802.11 are the focus of this survey but publications about other network types and technologies are also included. As percolation theory, epidemiological models, and delay tolerant networks are often referred as foundation, inspiration, or application of gossip routing in wireless networks, a brief introduction to each research domain is included and the applicability of the particular models for the gossip routing is discussed

MedLAN: Compact mobile computing system for wireless information access in emergency hospital wards

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.As the need for faster, safer and more efficient healthcare delivery increases, medical consultants seek new ways of implementing a high quality telemedical system, using innovative technology. Until today, teleconsultation (the most common application of Telemedicine) was performed by transferring the patient from the Accidents and Emergency ward, to a specially equipped room, or by moving large and heavy machinery to the place where the patient resided. Both these solutions were unpractical, uneconomical and potentially dangerous. At the same time wireless networks became increasingly useful in point-of-care areas such as hospitals, because of their ease of use, low cost of installation and increased flexibility. This thesis presents an integrated system called MedLAN dedicated for use inside the A&E hospital wards. Its purpose is to wirelessly support high-quality live video, audio, high-resolution still images and networks support from anywhere there is WLAN coverage. It is capable of transmitting all of the above to a consultant residing either inside or outside the hospital, or even to an external place, thorough the use of the Internet. To implement that, it makes use of the existing IEEE 802.11b wireless technology. Initially, this thesis demonstrates that for specific scenarios (such as when using WLANs), DICOM specifications should be adjusted to accommodate for the reduced WLAN bandwidth. Near lossless compression has been used to send still images through the WLANs and the results have been evaluated by a number of consultants to decide whether they retain their diagnostic value. The thesis further suggests improvements on the existing 802.11b protocol. In particular, as the typical hospital environment suffers from heavy RF reflections, it suggests that an alternative method of modulation (OFDM) can be embedded in the 802.11b hardware to reduce the multipath effect, increase the throughput and thus the video quality sent by the MedLAN system. Finally, realising that the trust between a patient and a doctor is fundamental this thesis proposes a series of simple actions aiming at securing the MedLAN system. Additionally, a concrete security system is suggested, that encapsulates the existing WEP security protocol, over IPSec

Robust, Resilient Networked Communication in Challenged Environments

In challenged environments, digital communication infrastructure may be difficult or even impossible to access. This is especially true in rural and developing regions, as well as in any region during a time of political or environmental crisis. We advance the state of the art in wireless networking and security to design networks and applications that rapidly assess changing networking conditions to restore communication and provide local situational awareness. This dissertation examines new systems for responding to current and emerging needs for wireless networks. This work looks across the wireless ecosystem of widely deployed standards. We develop new tools to improve network assessment and to provide robust and reliable network communication. By incorporating new technological breakthroughs, such as the wide commercial success of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), we introduce novel methods and systems for existing wireless standards for these challenged networks. We assess how existing technologies and standards function in difficult environments: lacking end-end Internet connectivity, experiencing overload or other resource constraints, and operating in three dimensional space. Through this lens, we demonstrate how to optimize networks to serve marginalized communities outside of first world urban cities and make our networks resilient to natural and political crisis that threaten communication