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

FPGA dynamic and partial reconfiguration : a survey of architectures, methods, and applications

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration are key differentiating capabilities of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). While they have been studied extensively in academic literature, they find limited use in deployed systems. We review FPGA reconfiguration, looking at architectures built for the purpose, and the properties of modern commercial architectures. We then investigate design flows, and identify the key challenges in making reconfigurable FPGA systems easier to design. Finally, we look at applications where reconfiguration has found use, as well as proposing new areas where this capability places FPGAs in a unique position for adoption

FlexStream: SDN-Based Framework for Programmable and Flexible Adaptive Video Streaming

With the tremendous increase in video traffic fueled by smartphones, tablets, 4G LTE networks, and other mobile devices and technologies, providing satisfactory services to end users in terms of playback quality and a fair share of network resources become challenging. As a result, an HTTP video streaming protocol was invented and widely adopted by most video providers today with the goal of maximizing the user’s quality of experience. However, despite the intensive efforts of major video providers such as YouTube and Netflix to improve their players, several studies as well as our measurements indicate that the players still suffer from several performance issues including instability and sub-optimality in the video bitrate, stalls in the playback, unfairness in sharing the available bandwidth, and inefficiency with regard to network utilization, considerably degrading the user’s QoE. These issues are frequently experienced when several players start competing over a common bottleneck. Interestingly, the root cause of these issues is the intermittent traffic pattern of the HTTP adaptive protocol that causes the players to over-estimate the available bandwidth and stream unsustainable video bitrates. In addition, the wireless network standards today do not allow the network to have a fine-grain control over individual devices which is necessary for providing resource usage coordination and global policy enforcement. We show that enabling such a network-side control would drive each device to fairly and efficiently utilize the network resources based on its current context, which would result in maximizing the overall viewing experience in the network and optimizing the bandwidth utilization. In this dissertation, we propose FlexStream, a flexible and programmable Software-Defined Network (SDN) based framework that solves all the adaptive streaming problems mentioned above. We develop FlexStream on top of the SDN-based framework that extends SDN functionality to mobile end devices, allowing for a fine-grained control and management of bandwidth based on real time context-awareness and specified policy. We demonstrate that FlexStream can be used to manage video delivery for a set of end devices over WiFi and cellular links and can effectively alleviate common problems such as player instability, playback stalls, large startup delay, and inappropriate bandwidth allocation. FlexStream offloads several tasks such as monitoring and policy enforcement to end-devices, while a network element (i.e., Global Controller), which has a global view of a network condition, is primarily employed to manage the resource allocation. This also alleviates the need for intrusive, large and costly traffic management solutions within the network, or modifications to servers that are not feasible in practice. We define an optimization method within the global controller for resource allocation to maximize video QoE considering context information, such as screen size and user priority. All features of FlexStream are implemented and validated on real mobile devices over real Wi-Fi and cellular networks. To the best of our knowledge, FlexStream is the first implementation of SDN-based control in a live cellular network that does not require any internal network support for SDN functionality

QoE on media deliveriy in 5G environments

231 p.5G expandirá las redes móviles con un mayor ancho de banda, menor latencia y la capacidad de proveer conectividad de forma masiva y sin fallos. Los usuarios de servicios multimedia esperan una experiencia de reproducción multimedia fluida que se adapte de forma dinámica a los intereses del usuario y a su contexto de movilidad. Sin embargo, la red, adoptando una posición neutral, no ayuda a fortalecer los parámetros que inciden en la calidad de experiencia. En consecuencia, las soluciones diseñadas para realizar un envío de tráfico multimedia de forma dinámica y eficiente cobran un especial interés. Para mejorar la calidad de la experiencia de servicios multimedia en entornos 5G la investigación llevada a cabo en esta tesis ha diseñado un sistema múltiple, basado en cuatro contribuciones.El primer mecanismo, SaW, crea una granja elástica de recursos de computación que ejecutan tareas de análisis multimedia. Los resultados confirman la competitividad de este enfoque respecto a granjas de servidores. El segundo mecanismo, LAMB-DASH, elige la calidad en el reproductor multimedia con un diseño que requiere una baja complejidad de procesamiento. Las pruebas concluyen su habilidad para mejorar la estabilidad, consistencia y uniformidad de la calidad de experiencia entre los clientes que comparten una celda de red. El tercer mecanismo, MEC4FAIR, explota las capacidades 5G de analizar métricas del envío de los diferentes flujos. Los resultados muestran cómo habilita al servicio a coordinar a los diferentes clientes en la celda para mejorar la calidad del servicio. El cuarto mecanismo, CogNet, sirve para provisionar recursos de red y configurar una topología capaz de conmutar una demanda estimada y garantizar unas cotas de calidad del servicio. En este caso, los resultados arrojan una mayor precisión cuando la demanda de un servicio es mayor

Embodied neuromorphic intelligence

The design of robots that interact autonomously with the environment and exhibit complex behaviours is an open challenge that can benefit from understanding what makes living beings fit to act in the world. Neuromorphic engineering studies neural computational principles to develop technologies that can provide a computing substrate for building compact and low-power processing systems. We discuss why endowing robots with neuromorphic technologies – from perception to motor control – represents a promising approach for the creation of robots which can seamlessly integrate in society. We present initial attempts in this direction, highlight open challenges, and propose actions required to overcome current limitations

Beyond 5G Domainless Network Operation enabled by Multiband: Toward Optical Continuum Architectures

Both public and private innovation projects are targeting the design, prototyping and demonstration of a novel end-to-end integrated packet-optical transport architecture based on Multi-Band (MB) optical transmission and switching networks. Essentially, MB is expected to be the next technological evolution to deal with the traffic demand and service requirements of 5G mobile networks, and beyond, in the most cost-effective manner. Thanks to MB transmission, classical telco architectures segmented into hierarchical levels and domains can move forward toward an optical network continuum, where edge access nodes are all-optically interconnected with top-hierarchical nodes, interfacing Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and Internet Exchange Points (IXP). This article overviews the technological challenges and innovation requirements to enable such an architectural shift of telco networks both from a data and control and management planes

The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System

While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions, demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable, and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today