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

A cross-layer approach to enhance QoS for multimedia applications over satellite

The need for on-demand QoS support for communications over satellite is of primary importance for distributed multimedia applications. This is particularly true for the return link which is often a bottleneck due to the large set of end-users accessing a very limited uplink resource. Facing this need, Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA) is a classical technique that allows satellite operators to offer various types of services, while managing the resources of the satellite system efficiently. Tackling the quality degradation and delay accumulation issues that can result from the use of these techniques, this paper proposes an instantiation of the Application Layer Framing (ALF) approach, using a cross-layer interpreter(xQoS-Interpreter). The information provided by this interpreter is used to manage the resource provided to a terminal by the satellite system in order to improve the quality of multimedia presentations from the end users point of view. Several experiments are carried out for different loads on the return link. Their impact on QoS is measured through different application as well as network level metrics

Design of interface selection protocols for multi-homed wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University on 10 December 2010.The IEEE 802.11/802.16 standards conformant wireless communication stations have multi-homing transmission capability. To achieve greater communication efficiency, multi-homing capable stations use handover mechanism to select appropriate transmission channel according to variations in the channel quality. This thesis presents three internal-linked handover schemes, (1) Interface Selection Protocol (ISP), belonging to Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)- Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) environment (2) Fast Channel Scanning (FCS) and (3) Traffic Manager (TM), (2) and (3) belonging to WiMAX Environment. The proposed schemes in this thesis use a novel mechanism of providing a reliable communication route. This solution is based on a cross-layer communication framework, where the interface selection module uses various network related parameters from Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer/Physical Layer (PHY) across the protocol suite for decision making at the Network layer. The proposed solutions are highly responsive when compared with existing multi-homed schemes; responsiveness is one of the key factors in the design of such protocols. Selected route under these schemes is based on the most up to date link-layer information. Therefore, such a route is not only reliable in terms of route optimization but it also fulfils the application demands in terms of throughput and delay. Design of ISP protocol use probing frames during the route discovery process. The 802.11 mandates the use of different rates for data transmission frames. The ISP-metric can be incorporated into various routing aspects and its applicability is determined by the possibility of provision of MAC dependent parameters that are used to determine the best path metric values. In many cases, higher device density, interference and mobility cause variable medium access delays. It causes creation of ‘unreachable zones’, where destination is marked as unreachable. However, by use of the best path metric, the destination has been made reachable, anytime and anywhere, because of the intelligent use of the probing frames and interface selection algorithm implemented. The IEEE 802.16e introduces several MAC level queues for different access categories, maintaining service requirement within these queues; which imply that frames from a higher priority queue, i.e. video frames, are serviced more frequently than those belonging to lower priority queues. Such an enhancement at the MAC sub-layer introduces uneven queuing delays. Conventional routing protocols are unaware of such MAC specific constraints and as a result, these factors are not considered which result in channel performance degradation. To meet such challenges, the thesis presents FCS and TM schemes for WiMAX. For FCS, Its solution is to improve the mobile WiMAX handover and address the scanning latency. Since minimum scanning time is the most important issue in the handover process. This handover scheme aims to utilize the channel efficiently and apply such a procedure to reduce the time it takes to scan the neighboring access stations. TM uses MAC and physical layer (PHY) specific information in the interface metric and maintains a separate path to destination by applying an alternative interface operation. Simulation tests and comparisons with existing multi-homed protocols and handover schemes demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the medium dependent parameters. Moreover, show that suggested schemes, have shown better performance in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput, with efficiency up to 40% in specific test scenarios

Seamless Multimedia Delivery Within a Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Environment: Are We There Yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurizes the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of quality of experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty, and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users' quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: 1) adaptation; 2) energy efficiency; and 3) multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges, and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided