634 research outputs found
A survey on buffer and rate adaptation optimization in TCP-based streaming media studies
Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom that
the best transport protocol for the streaming media is UDP,
many findings found that most of the transport protocols used nowadays are TCP. Two main reasons that UDP is not being used widely are it is not friendly to other flows and some organizations are blocking this protocol. In the meantime,TCP is naturally reliable and friendly to other flows. But with so many controls inbuilt in the protocol; such as congestion control, flow control, and others with the heavy acknowledgement mechanism, resulting delays and jitters.Thus itâs naturally not friendly to the streaming media.But with all the inherited weaknesses, we have seen explosive growth of streaming media in the Internet. With these contrasting premises, it is very interesting to study and investigate the streaming media via TCP transport protocol,specifically on buffer and rate adaptation optimization
Enhanced transport protocols for real time and streaming applications on wireless links
Real time communications have, in the last decade, become a highly relevant component of Internet applications and services, with both interactive communications and streamed content being used in developed and developing countries alike. Due to the proliferation of mobile devices, wireless media is becoming the means of transmitting a large part of this increasingly important real time communications traffic.
Wireless has also become an important technology in developing countries, with satellite communications being increasingly deployed for traffic backhaul and ubiquitous connection to the Internet. A number of issues need to be addressed in order to have an acceptable service quality for real time communications in wireless environments. In addition to this, the availability of multiple wireless interfaces on mobile devices presents an opportunity to improve and further exacerbates the issues already present on single wireless links.
Therefore in this thesis, we consider improvements to transport protocols for real time communications and streaming services to address these problems and we provide the following contributions. To deal with wireless link issues of errors and delay, we propose two enhancements.
First, an improvement technique for Datagram Congestion Control Protocol
CCID4 for long delay wireless (e.g. satellite) links, demonstrating significant performance improvements for Voice over IP applications. To deal with link errors, we have proposed, implemented and evaluated an erasure coding based packet error correction approach for Concurrent Multipath Transfer extension of Stream Control Transport Protocol data transport over multiple wireless paths. We have identified packet reordering as a major cause of performance degradation in both single and multi-path transport protocols for real time communications and media streaming. We have proposed a dynamically resizable buffer based solution to mitigate this problem within the DCCP protocol. For improving the performance of multi-path transport protocols over dissimilar network paths, we have proposed a delay aware packet scheduling scheme, which significantly improves the performance of multimedia and bulk data transfer with CMT-SCTP in heterogeneous multi-path network scenarios. Finally, we have developed a tool for online streaming video quality evaluation experiments, comprising a real-time cross-layer video streaming technique implemented within an open-source H.264 video encoder tool called x264
Content-Aware Multimedia Communications
The demands for fast, economic and reliable dissemination of multimedia
information are steadily growing within our society. While people and
economy increasingly rely on communication technologies, engineers still
struggle with their growing complexity.
Complexity in multimedia communication originates from several sources. The
most prominent is the unreliability of packet networks like the Internet.
Recent advances in scheduling and error control mechanisms for streaming
protocols have shown that the quality and robustness of multimedia delivery
can be improved significantly when protocols are aware of the content they
deliver. However, the proposed mechanisms require close cooperation between
transport systems and application layers which increases the overall system
complexity. Current approaches also require expensive metrics and focus on
special encoding formats only. A general and efficient model is missing so
far.
This thesis presents efficient and format-independent solutions to support
cross-layer coordination in system architectures. In particular, the first
contribution of this work is a generic dependency model that enables
transport layers to access content-specific properties of media streams,
such as dependencies between data units and their importance. The second
contribution is the design of a programming model for streaming
communication and its implementation as a middleware architecture. The
programming model hides the complexity of protocol stacks behind simple
programming abstractions, but exposes cross-layer control and monitoring
options to application programmers. For example, our interfaces allow
programmers to choose appropriate failure semantics at design time while
they can refine error protection and visibility of low-level errors at
run-time.
Based on some examples we show how our middleware simplifies the
integration of stream-based communication into large-scale application
architectures. An important result of this work is that despite cross-layer
cooperation, neither application nor transport protocol designers
experience an increase in complexity. Application programmers can even
reuse existing streaming protocols which effectively increases system
robustness.Der Bedarf unsere Gesellschaft nach kostengĂŒnstiger und
zuverlÀssiger
Kommunikation wÀchst stetig. WÀhrend wir uns selbst immer mehr von modernen
Kommunikationstechnologien abhĂ€ngig machen, mĂŒssen die Ingenieure dieser
Technologien sowohl den Bedarf nach schneller EinfĂŒhrung neuer Produkte
befriedigen als auch die wachsende KomplexitÀt der Systeme beherrschen.
Gerade die Ăbertragung multimedialer Inhalte wie Video und Audiodaten ist
nicht trivial. Einer der prominentesten GrĂŒnde dafĂŒr ist die
UnzuverlÀssigkeit heutiger Netzwerke, wie z.B.~dem Internet. Paketverluste
und schwankende Laufzeiten können die DarstellungsqualitÀt massiv
beeintrĂ€chtigen. Wie jĂŒngste Entwicklungen im Bereich der
Streaming-Protokolle zeigen, sind jedoch QualitÀt und Robustheit der
Ăbertragung effizient kontrollierbar, wenn Streamingprotokolle
Informationen ĂŒber den Inhalt der transportierten Daten ausnutzen.
Existierende AnsÀtze, die den Inhalt von Multimediadatenströmen
beschreiben, sind allerdings meist auf einzelne Kompressionsverfahren
spezialisiert und verwenden berechnungsintensive Metriken. Das reduziert
ihren praktischen Nutzen deutlich. AuĂerdem erfordert der
Informationsaustausch eine enge Kooperation zwischen Applikationen und
Transportschichten. Da allerdings die Schnittstellen aktueller
Systemarchitekturen nicht darauf vorbereitet sind, mĂŒssen entweder die
Schnittstellen erweitert oder alternative Architekturkonzepte geschaffen
werden. Die Gefahr beider Varianten ist jedoch, dass sich die KomplexitÀt
eines Systems dadurch weiter erhöhen kann.
Das zentrale Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es deshalb,
schichtenĂŒbergreifende Koordination bei gleichzeitiger Reduzierung der
KomplexitÀt zu erreichen. Hier leistet die Arbeit zwei BetrÀge zum
aktuellen Stand der Forschung. Erstens definiert sie ein universelles
Modell zur Beschreibung von Inhaltsattributen, wie Wichtigkeiten und
AbhÀngigkeitsbeziehungen innerhalb eines Datenstroms. Transportschichten
können dieses Wissen zur effizienten Fehlerkontrolle verwenden. Zweitens
beschreibt die Arbeit das Noja Programmiermodell fĂŒr multimediale
Middleware. Noja definiert Abstraktionen zur Ăbertragung und Kontrolle
multimedialer Ströme, die die Koordination von Streamingprotokollen mit
Applikationen ermöglichen. Zum Beispiel können Programmierer geeignete
Fehlersemantiken und Kommunikationstopologien auswÀhlen und den konkreten
Fehlerschutz dann zur Laufzeit verfeinern und kontrolliere
Quality of service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless LANs
Delivering multimedia content to heterogeneous devices over a variable networking environment while maintaining high quality levels involves many technical challenges. The research reported in this thesis presents a solution for Quality of Service (QoS)-based service differentiation when delivering multimedia content over the wireless LANs. This thesis has three major contributions outlined below:
1. A Model-based Bandwidth Estimation algorithm (MBE), which estimates the available bandwidth based on novel TCP and UDP throughput models over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. MBE has been modelled, implemented, and tested through simulations and real life testing. In comparison with other bandwidth estimation techniques, MBE shows better performance in terms of error rate, overhead, and loss.
2. An intelligent Prioritized Adaptive Scheme (iPAS), which provides QoS service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless networks. iPAS assigns dynamic priorities to various streams and determines their bandwidth share by employing a probabilistic approach-which makes use of stereotypes. The total bandwidth to be allocated is estimated using MBE. The priority level of individual stream is variable and dependent on stream-related characteristics and delivery QoS parameters. iPAS can be deployed seamlessly over the original IEEE 802.11 protocols and can be included in the IEEE 802.21 framework in order to optimize the control signal communication. iPAS has been modelled, implemented, and evaluated via simulations. The results demonstrate that iPAS achieves better performance than the equal channel access mechanism over IEEE 802.11 DCF and a service differentiation scheme on top of IEEE 802.11e EDCA, in terms of fairness, throughput, delay, loss, and estimated PSNR. Additionally, both objective and subjective video quality assessment have been performed using a prototype system.
3. A QoS-based Downlink/Uplink Fairness Scheme, which uses the stereotypes-based structure to balance the QoS parameters (i.e. throughput, delay, and loss) between downlink and uplink VoIP traffic. The proposed scheme has been modelled and tested through simulations. The results show that, in comparison with other downlink/uplink fairness-oriented solutions, the proposed scheme performs better in terms of VoIP capacity and fairness level between downlink and uplink traffic
Video quality estimation of {DCCP} streaming over wireless networks
International audienceThis paper describes a streaming architecture simulation model above Network Simulator 2 (NS2) which allows to define specific transport properties. Multimedia contents are specific because they are time-dependent and they can undergo small deterioration if necessary. We simulate such a congestion control that has the ability to decrease the multimedia quality in case of network congestion in order to decrease packet losses and packet delivery delays. We integrate this video congestion control inside DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) and TFRC (TCP Friendly Rate Control). The transcoding of the multimedia contents is realized thanks to the NetMoVie simulation model which is an RTP mixer. We compare the adaptive transport solution to the classic transport solution without any adaptive mechanism. The Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the received multimedia contents is measured and compared for better visualization
DeepSHARQ: hybrid error coding using deep learning
Cyber-physical systems operate under changing environments and on resource-constrained devices. Communication in these
environments must use hybrid error coding, as pure pro- or reactive schemes cannot always fulfill application demands or have
suboptimal performance. However, finding optimal coding configurations that fulfill application constraintsâe.g., tolerate
loss and delayâunder changing channel conditions is a computationally challenging task. Recently, the systems community
has started addressing these sorts of problems using hybrid decomposed solutions, i.e., algorithmic approaches for wellunderstood formalized parts of the problem and learning-based approaches for parts that must be estimated (either for reasons
of uncertainty or computational intractability). For DeepSHARQ, we revisit our own recent work and limit the learning
problem to block length prediction, the major contributor to inference time (and its variation) when searching for hybrid error
coding configurations. The remaining parameters are found algorithmically, and hence we make individual contributions with
respect to finding close-to-optimal coding configurations in both of these areasâcombining them into a hybrid solution.
DeepSHARQ applies block length regularization in order to reduce the neural networks in comparison to purely learningbased solutions. The hybrid solution is nearly optimal concerning the channel efficiency of coding configurations it generates,
as it is trained so deviations from the optimum are upper bound by a configurable percentage. In addition, DeepSHARQ is
capable of reacting to channel changes in real time, thereby enabling cyber-physical systems even on resource-constrained
platforms. Tightly integrating algorithmic and learning-based approaches allows DeepSHARQ to react to channel changes
faster and with a more predictable time than solutions that rely only on either of the two approaches
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