A heterogeneous peer-to-peer network testbed

In this paper, we describe a heterogeneous peer-to-peer network testbed, which is developed as part of a joint research project to investigate novel resource discovery and content distribution protocols in a heterogeneous wired/wireless environment. We describe the testbed requirements, the testbed architecture, the multi-functional wireless node, and the software architecture. We also describe some of the proposed protocols to be developed and tested on the testbed. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 1st International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2009), Hong Kong, 7-9 June 2009. In Proceedings of the 1st ICUFN, 2009, p. 46-5

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

On localized application-driven topology control for energy-efficient wireless peer-to-peer file sharing

Wireless Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing Is widely envisioned as one of the major applications of ad hoc networks in the near future. This trend is largely motivated by the recent advances in high-speed wireless communication technologies and high traffic demand for P2P file sharing applications. To achieve the ambitious goal of realizing a practical wireless P2P network, we need a scalable topology control protocol to solve the neighbor discovery problem and network organization problem. Indeed, we believe that the topology control mechanism should be application driven in that we should try to achieve an efficient connectivity among mobile devices in order to better serve the file sharing application. We propose a new protocol, which consists of two components, namely, Adjacency Set Construction (ASC) and Community-Based Asynchronous Wakeup (CAW). Our proposed protocol is shown to be able to enhance the fairness and provide an incentive mechanism in wireless P2P file sharing applications. It is also capable of increasing the energy efficiency. © 2008 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

A Privacy-Aware Distributed Storage and Replication Middleware for Heterogeneous Computing Platform

Cloud computing is an emerging research area that has drawn considerable interest in recent years. However, the current infrastructure raises significant concerns about how to protect users\u27 privacy, in part due to that users are storing their data in the cloud vendors\u27 servers. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing and implementing a novel middleware, called Uno, which separates the storage of physical data and their associated metadata. In our design, users\u27 physical data are stored locally on those devices under a user\u27s full control, while their metadata can be uploaded to the commercial cloud. To ensure the reliability of users\u27 data, we develop a novel fine-grained file replication algorithm that exploits both data access patterns and device state patterns. Based on a quantitative analysis of the data set from Rice University, this algorithm replicates data intelligently in different time slots, so that it can not only significantly improve data availability, but also achieve a satisfactory performance on load balancing and storage diversification. We implement the Uno system on a heterogeneous testbed composed of both host servers and mobile devices, and demonstrate the programmability of Uno through implementation and evaluation of two sample applications, Uno@Home and Uno@Sense

Building Robust Distributed Infrastructure Networks

Many competing designs for Distributed Hash Tables exist exploring multiple models of addressing, routing and network maintenance. Designing a general theoretical model and implementation of a Distributed Hash Table allows exploration of the possible properties of Distributed Hash Tables. We will propose a generalized model of DHT behavior, centered on utilizing Delaunay triangulation in a given metric space to maintain the networks topology. We will show that utilizing this model we can produce network topologies that approximate existing DHT methods and provide a starting point for further exploration. We will use our generalized model of DHT construction to design and implement more efficient Distributed Hash Table protocols, and discuss the qualities of potential successors to existing DHT technologies

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

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

Measurement-Driven Algorithm and System Design for Wireless and Datacenter Networks

The growing number of mobile devices and data-intensive applications pose unique challenges for wireless access networks as well as datacenter networks that enable modern cloud-based services. With the enormous increase in volume and complexity of traffic from applications such as video streaming and cloud computing, the interconnection networks have become a major performance bottleneck. In this thesis, we study algorithms and architectures spanning several layers of the networking protocol stack that enable and accelerate novel applications and that are easily deployable and scalable. The design of these algorithms and architectures is motivated by measurements and observations in real world or experimental testbeds. In the first part of this thesis, we address the challenge of wireless content delivery in crowded areas. We present the AMuSe system, whose objective is to enable scalable and adaptive WiFi multicast. AMuSe is based on accurate receiver feedback and incurs a small control overhead. This feedback information can be used by the multicast sender to optimize multicast service quality, e.g., by dynamically adjusting transmission bitrate. Specifically, we develop an algorithm for dynamic selection of a subset of the multicast receivers as feedback nodes which periodically send information about the channel quality to the multicast sender. Further, we describe the Multicast Dynamic Rate Adaptation (MuDRA) algorithm that utilizes AMuSe's feedback to optimally tune the physical layer multicast rate. MuDRA balances fast adaptation to channel conditions and stability, which is essential for multimedia applications. We implemented the AMuSe system on the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with approximately 200 WiFi nodes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that AMuSe can provide accurate feedback in a dense multicast environment. It outperforms several alternatives even in the case of external interference and changing network conditions. Further, our experimental evaluation of MuDRA on the ORBIT testbed shows that MuDRA outperforms other schemes and supports high throughput multicast flows to hundreds of nodes while meeting quality requirements. As an example application, MuDRA can support multiple high quality video streams, where 90% of the nodes report excellent or very good video quality. Next, we specifically focus on ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) for video streaming over WiFi multicast. We formulate the problem of joint adaptation of multicast transmission rate and video rate for ensuring high video QoE as a utility maximization problem and propose an online control algorithm called DYVR which is based on Lyapunov optimization techniques. We evaluated the performance of DYVR through analysis, simulations, and experiments using a testbed composed of Android devices and o the shelf APs. Our evaluation shows that DYVR can ensure high video rates while guaranteeing a low but acceptable number of segment losses, buffer underflows, and video rate switches. We leverage the lessons learnt from AMuSe for WiFi to address the performance issues with LTE evolved Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (eMBMS). We present the Dynamic Monitoring (DyMo) system which provides low-overhead and real-time feedback about eMBMS performance. DyMo employs eMBMS for broadcasting instructions which indicate the reporting rates as a function of the observed Quality of Service (QoS) for each UE. This simple feedback mechanism collects very limited QoS reports which can be used for network optimization. We evaluated the performance of DyMo analytically and via simulations. DyMo infers the optimal eMBMS settings with extremely low overhead, while meeting strict QoS requirements under different UE mobility patterns and presence of network component failures. In the second part of the thesis, we study datacenter networks which are key enablers of the end-user applications such as video streaming and storage. Datacenter applications such as distributed file systems, one-to-many virtual machine migrations, and large-scale data processing involve bulk multicast flows. We propose a hardware and software system for enabling physical layer optical multicast in datacenter networks using passive optical splitters. We built a prototype and developed a simulation environment to evaluate the performance of the system for bulk multicasting. Our evaluation shows that the optical multicast architecture can achieve higher throughput and lower latency than IP multicast and peer-to-peer multicast schemes with lower switching energy consumption. Finally, we study the problem of congestion control in datacenter networks. Quantized Congestion Control (QCN), a switch-supported standard, utilizes direct multi-bit feedback from the network for hardware rate limiting. Although QCN has been shown to be fast-reacting and effective, being a Layer-2 technology limits its adoption in IP-routed Layer 3 datacenters. We address several design challenges to overcome QCN feedback's Layer- 2 limitation and use it to design window-based congestion control (QCN-CC) and load balancing (QCN-LB) schemes. Our extensive simulations, based on real world workloads, demonstrate the advantages of explicit, multi-bit congestion feedback, especially in a typical environment where intra-datacenter traffic with short Round Trip Times (RTT: tens of s) run in conjunction with web-facing traffic with long RTTs (tens of milliseconds)