Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

Band Codes for Energy-Efficient Network Coding with Application to P2P Mobile Streaming

A key problem in random network coding (NC) lies in the complexity and energy consumption associated with the packet decoding processes, which hinder its application in mobile environments. Controlling and hence limiting such factors has always been an important but elusive research goal, since the packet degree distribution, which is the main factor driving the complexity, is altered in a non-deterministic way by the random recombinations at the network nodes. In this paper we tackle this problem proposing Band Codes (BC), a novel class of network codes specifically designed to preserve the packet degree distribution during packet encoding, ecombination and decoding. BC are random codes over GF(2) that exhibit low decoding complexity, feature limited and controlled degree distribution by construction, and hence allow to effectively apply NC even in energy-constrained scenarios. In particular, in this paper we motivate and describe our new design and provide a thorough analysis of its performance. We provide numerical simulations of the performance of BC in order to validate the analysis and assess the overhead of BC with respect to a onventional NC scheme. Moreover, peer-to-peer media streaming experiments with a random-push protocol show that BC reduce the decoding complexity by a factor of two, to a point where NC-based mobile streaming to mobile devices becomes practically feasible.Comment: To be published in IEEE Transacions on Multimedi

Network coding: from theory to media streaming

Network coding has recently emerged as an alternative to traditional routing algorithms in communication systems. In network coding, the network nodes can combine the packets they receive before forwarding them to the neighbouring nodes. Intensive research efforts have demonstrated that such a processing in the network nodes can provide advantages in terms of throughput or robustness. These potentials, combined with the advent of ad hoc and wireless delivery architectures have triggered the interest of research community about the application of the network coding principles to streaming applications. This paper describes the potentials of network coding in emerging delivery architectures such as overlay or peer-to-peer networks. It overviews the principles of practical network coding algorithms and outlines the challenges posed by multimedia streaming applications. Finally, it provides a survey of the recent work on the application of network coding to media streaming applications, both in wireless or wired communication scenarios. Promising results have been demonstrated where network coding is able to bring benefits in media streaming applications. However, delay and complexity constraints are often posed as the main challenging issues that still prevent the wide-scale deployment of network coding algorithms in multimedia communication

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges

An ant-based rate allocation algorithm for media streaming in peer to peer networks: extension to multiple sessions and dynamic networks

In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm for rate allocation in media stream- ing P2P networks where multimedia contents are distributed among network members and streamed toward any requesting peer. The proposed algorithm is based on ant-colony optimization. It is capable of handling network dynamism, which is an inherent property of unstructured P2P networks. Another advantage of our algorithm is its ability to get over uncertainties in network state information, particularly the rate of supplying peers that could happen due to lack of accurate measurements. In addition, the suggested method does not rely on any information about the topology of the network. We have investigated both single and multiple streaming sessions scenarios in which more than one peer is receiving media streams from media providers. We show that the suggested algorithm will reach the maximum achievable rate of the network quite fast. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is its low pass filter property, which makes it discriminate between transient and permanent network changes. If the changes are transient, the algorithm easily and rapidly compensates the temporary losses. In cases where the network changes last longer, the algorithm overcomes losses by employing other nodes that have the media stream available. The rate of adaptation is adjustable and must be carefully determined according to network conditions. Moreover, adaption rate is not constant and varies during the streaming session. This results in uninterrupted services for current users in cases where multiple sessions are present in the network. Finally, since we have assumed that fountain codes are used to encode media streams in the P2P networks, the suggested algorithm does not require the user to receive different parts of the streams according to a predefined order and from a specific list of media suppliers. It suffices that the user gets as many stream chunks as necessary, regardless of their order or the fact that not all the media suppliers have all the parts available. In other words, using fountain codes enables us to overcome a big difficulty of P2P media streaming and that is to receive different parts of media streams according to a specific order

Community computation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-186).In this thesis we lay the foundations for a distributed, community-based computing environment to tap the resources of a community to better perform some tasks, either computationally hard or economically prohibitive, or physically inconvenient, that one individual is unable to accomplish efficiently. We introduce community coding, where information systems meet social networks, to tackle some of the challenges in this new paradigm of community computation. We design algorithms, protocols and build system prototypes to demonstrate the power of community computation to better deal with reliability, scalability and security issues, which are the main challenges in many emerging community-computing environments, in several application scenarios such as community storage, community sensing and community security. For example, we develop a community storage system that is based upon a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) storage paradigm, where we take an array of small, periodically accessible, individual computers/peer nodes and create a secure, reliable and large distributed storage system. The goal is for each one of them to act as if they have immediate access to a pool of information that is larger than they could hold themselves, and into which they can contribute new stuff in a both open and secure manner. Such a contributory and self-scaling community storage system is particularly useful where reliable infrastructure is not readily available in that such a system facilitates easy ad-hoc construction and easy portability. In another application scenario, we develop a novel framework of community sensing with a group of image sensors. The goal is to present a set of novel tools in which software, rather than humans, examines the collection of images sensed by a group of image sensors to determine what is happening in the field of view. We also present several design principles in the aspects of community security. In one application example, we present community-based email spain detection approach to deal with email spams more efficiently.by Fulu Li.Ph.D

Network Coding-Based Next-Generation IoT for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 has become the main source of applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), which is generating new business opportunities. The use of cloud computing and artificial intelligence is also showing remarkable improvements in industrial operation, saving millions of dollars to manufacturers. The need for time-critical decision-making is evidencing a trade-off between latency and computation, urging Industrial IoT (IIoT) deployments to integrate fog nodes to perform early analytics. In this chapter, we review next-generation IIoT architectures, which aim to meet the requirements of industrial applications, such as low-latency and highly reliable communications. These architectures can be divided into IoT node, fog, and multicloud layers. We describe these three layers and compare their characteristics, providing also different use-cases of IIoT architectures. We introduce network coding (NC) as a solution to meet some of the requirements of next-generation communications. We review a variety of its approaches as well as different scenarios that improve their performance and reliability thanks to this technique. Then, we describe the communication process across the different levels of the architecture based on NC-based state-of-the-art works. Finally, we summarize the benefits and open challenges of combining IIoT architectures together with NC techniques

P2P Video Streaming with Inter-session Network Coding

We present a novel receiver-driven p2p system for delivery of multiple concurrent time constrained data streams in overlay networks. We propose an effective combination of rateless coding with intra- and inter-session network coding to efficiently exploit the path diversity in the streaming overlay. Network nodes can decide to forward rateless coded packets or to code them in intra- or inter-session mode before transmission. The transmission strategy is determined based on the availability of data sources and the demands of the children nodes. Each network node solves independently a simple flow maximization problem in order to determine the optimal coding policy. The overall system is evaluated for various networks and the results outline the advantages of the proposed approach over intra-session network coding based schemes in terms of clients' satisfaction, innovative flow rate and decoding delay