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

Adaptable Service Oriented Infrastructure Provisioning with Lightweight Containers Virtualization Technology

Modern computing infrastructures should enable realization of converged provisioning and governance operations on virtualized computing, storage and network resources used on behalf of users' workloads. These workloads must have ensured sufficient access to the resources to satisfy required QoS. This requires flexible platforms providing functionality for construction, activation and governance of Runtime Infrastructure which can be realized according to Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) paradigm. Implementation of the SOI management framework requires definition of flexible architecture and utilization of advanced software engineering and policy-based techniques. The paper presents an Adaptable SOI Provisioning Platform which supports adaptable SOI provisioning with lightweight virtualization, compliant with the structured process model suitable for construction, activation and governance of IT environments. The requirements, architecture and implementation of the platform are all discussed. Practical usage of the platform is presented on the basis of a complex case study for provisioning JEE middleware on top of the Solaris 10 lightweight virtualization platform

A framework to provide charging for third party composite services

Includes synopsis.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-87).Over the past few years the trend in the telecommunications industry has been geared towards offering new and innovative services to end users. A decade ago network operators were content with offering simple services such as voice and text messaging. However, they began to notice that these services were generating lower revenues even while the number of subscribers increased. This was a direct result of the market saturation and network operators were forced to rapidly deploy services with minimum capital investment and while maximising revenue from service usage by end users. Network operators can achieve this by exposing the network to external content and service providers. They would create interfaces that would allow these 3rd party service and content providers to offer their applications and services to users. Composing and bundling of these services will essentially create new services for the user and achieve rapid deployment of enhanced services. The concept of offering a wide range of services that are coordinated in such a way that they deliver a unique experience has sparked interest and numerous research on Service Delivery Platforms (SDP). SDP‟s will enable network operators to be able to develop and offer a wide-variety service set. Given this interest on SDP standardisation bodies such as International Telecommunications Union – Telecommunications (ITU-T), Telecoms and Internet converged Servicers and Protocols for Advanced Networks) (TISPAN), 3rd Generations Partnership Project (3GPP) and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) are leading efforts into standardising functions and protocols to enhance service delivery by network operators. Obtaining revenue from these services requires effective accounting of service usage and requires mechanisms for billing and charging of these services. The IP Multimedia subsystem(IMS) is a Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture that provides a platform for which multimedia services can be developed and deployed by network operators. The IMS provides network operators, both fixed or mobile, with a control layer that allows them to offer services that will enable them to remain key role players within the industry. Achieving this in an environment where the network operator interacts directly with the 3rd party service providers may become complicated

A QoS monitoring system in a heterogeneous multi-domain DVB-H platform

The MobileTV, IPTV, and DVB standards (DVB-H/T) have been defined to offer mobile users interactive multimedia services with quality of service (QoS) consistency analogous to TV services. However, the market has yet to provide effective and economical solutions for the real-time delivery of such services to the corresponding transmitters over multi-domain IP networks. The monitoring system proposed in this paper enables the QoS in the IP networks involved in the delivery of real-time multimedia content to the transmitters to be ascertained. The system utilizes the QoS parameters defined in MPEG-2 Transport Streams to detect problems occurring in the heterogeneous multi-domain IP networks. The ability to detect problems having an adverse effect on QoS allows appropriate control actions to be determined to recover the QoS across the composite IP network. The design and implementation of the proposed QoS-Monitoring system (QoS-MS) is presented, followed by analysis of experimental results that demonstrate the feasibility of the system

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Demonstrating the feasibility of standardized application program interfaces that will allow mobile/portable terminals to receive services combining UMTS and DVB-T

Crucial to the commercial exploitation of any service combining UMTS and DVB-T is the availability of standardized API’s adapted to the hybrid UMTS and DVB-T network and to the technical limitations of mobile/portable terminals. This paper describes work carried out in the European Commission Framework Program 5 (FP5) project CONFLUENT to demonstrate the feasibility of such Application Program Interfaces (API’s) by enabling the reception of a Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) based application transmitted over DVB-T on five different terminals with parts of the service running on a mobile phone

Dynamic service composition for telecommunication services and its challenges

As communication networks have evolved towards IP (Internet Protocol) networks, telecommunication operators has expanded its reach to internet multimedia web content services while operating circuit-switch networks in parallel. With the adoption of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that enables service capability interfaces to be published and integrated with other service capabilities into new composite service, service composition allows telecommunication providers to accelerate more new services provisioning. From the perspective of telecommunication providers to deliver integrated composite service from different providers and different network protocols, this paper is aimed to present the current service composition based on middleware approaches; discuss the requirements of meeting the challenges; and compare the approaches

Models to evaluate service Provisioning over Cloud Computing Environments - A Blockchain-As-A-Service case study

ThestrictnessoftheServiceLevelAgreements(SLAs)ismainlyduetoasetofconstraintsrelated to performance and dependability attributes, such as availability. This paper shows that system’s availability values may be improved by deploying services over a private environment, which may obtain better availability values with improved management, security, and control. However, how much a company needs to afford to keep this improved availability? As an additional activity, this paper compares the obtained availability values with the infrastructure deployment expenses and establishes a cost × benefit relationship. As for the system’s evaluation technique, we choose modeling; while for the service used to demonstrate the models’ feasibility, the blockchain-as-a-service was the selected one. This paper proposes and evaluate four different infrastructures hosting blockchains: (i) baseline; (ii) double redundant; (iii) triple redundant, and (iv) hyper-converged. The obtained results pointed out that the hyper-converged architecture had an advantage over a full triple redundant environment regarding availability and deployment cost