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

Optimal configuration of active and backup servers for augmented reality cooperative games

Interactive applications as online games and mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years. From their combination, new and interesting cooperative services could be generated. For instance, gamers endowed with Augmented Reality (AR) visors connected as wireless nodes in an ad-hoc network, can interact with each other while immersed in the game. To enable this vision, we discuss here a hybrid architecture enabling game play in ad-hoc mode instead of the traditional client-server setting. In our architecture, one of the player nodes also acts as the server of the game, whereas other backup server nodes are ready to become active servers in case of disconnection of the network i.e. due to low energy level of the currently active server. This allows to have a longer gaming session before incurring in disconnections or energy exhaustion. In this context, the server election strategy with the aim of maximizing network lifetime is not so straightforward. To this end, we have hence analyzed this issue through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model and both numerical and simulation-based analysis shows that the backup servers solution fulfills its design objective

Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference

Discovery and Push Notification Mechanisms for Mobile Cloud Services

Viimase viie aasta jooksul on mobiilsed seadmed nagu sülearvutid, pihuarvutid, nutitelefonid jmt. tunginud peaaegu kõigisse inimeste igapäevaelu tegevustesse. Samuti on põhjalik teadus- ja arendustegevus mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas viinud märkimisväärsete täiustusteni riistvara, tarkvara ja andmeedastuse alal. Tänapäeval on mobiilsed seadmed varustatud sisseehitatud sensorite, kaamera, puutetundliku ekraani, suurema hulga mäluga, kuid ka tõhusamate energiatarbemehhanismidega. Lisaks on iOS ja Android operatsioonisüsteemide väljalaske tõttu suurenenud nii mobiilirakenduste arv kui keerukus, pakkudes arvukamalt kõrgetasemelisi rakendusi. Sarnaselt on toimunud olulised arengud ja standardiseerimisele suunatud jõupingutused veebiteenusete valdkonnas ja elementaarsetele veebiteenuste ligipääsu kasutatakse laialdaselt nutitelefonidest. See on viinud loogilise järgmise sammuna veebiteenuste pakkumiseni nutitelefonidest. Telefonidest veebiteenuste pakkumise kontseptsioon ei ole uus ning seda on põhjalikult uurinud Srirama, kes pakkus välja Mobile Host (Mobiilne Veebiteenuse Pakkuja) kontseptsiooni. Algne realisatsioon kasutas aga aegunud tehnoloogiaid nagu JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP arhitektuur jne. See töö uuendab Mobile Host'i kasutades uusimaid tehnoloogiad, nagu Android OS ja REST arhitektuur, ning pakub välja teenusemootori, mis põhineb Apache Felix'il - OSGi platvormi realisatsioonil piiratud ressurssidega seadmetele. Hämmastava kiirusega toimunud arengud mobiilsete arvutuste vallas võimaldavad uue põlvkonna veebirakenduste loomist valdkondades nagu keskkonnateadlikkus, sotsiaalvõrgustikud, koostöövahendid, asukohapõhised teenused jne. Sellised rakendused saavad ära kasutada Mobile Host'i võimalusi. Selle tulemusena on klientidel ligipääs väga suurele hulgale teenustele, mistõttu tekib vajadus efektiivse teenuste avastamise mehhanismi järele. See töö pakub välja kataloogipõhise avastusmehhanismi võrgu ülekatte toega suurtele, kõrge liikuvusega võrgustikele. See mehhanism toetub OWL-S'le, mis on ontoloogia veebiteenuseid pakkuvate ressursside avastamiseks, väljakutseks, koostamiseks ja jälgimiseks. Töö kirjeldab ka Srirama välja pakutud algupärast teenuste avastamise mehhanismi, mis toetub peer-to-peer võrkudele ja Apache Lucene võtmesõna otsingumootorile. Uurimuse käigus uuendatakse teenuseotsing kasutama Apache Solr'i, Apache Lucene'i viimast versiooni. Teenuste avastust testiti põhjalikult ja tulemused on töös kokkuvõtvalt välja toodud. Mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas uuritakse ka võimalust kasutada pilvetehnolologiat laiendamaks mobiilseadmete salvestusmahtu ja töökoormust edastades pilve andme- ja arvutusmahukad ülesanded. See soodustab keerulisemate ja võimalusrohkemate mobiilirakenduste arendust. Pilve delegeeritavate toimingute aeganõudva iseloomu tõttu aga on vajalik asünkroonne mehhanism teavitamaks kasutajat, millal töömahukad tegevused on lõpetatud. Mobiilsete pilveteenuste pakkujad ja vahevara lahendused võivad kasu saada Mobile Host'ist ja selle asünkroonsete teavituste võimekusest. Uurimus esitleb nelja teavitusmehhanismi: AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT ja Mobile Host'i põhine teavitus. Töö võtab kokku kvantitatiivse analüüsi tulemused ja toob välja nelja teavitamise lähenemise tugevused ja nõrkused. Lisaks kirjeldatakse CroudSTag rakenduse realisatsiooni - CroudSTag on mobiilirakendus, mille eesmärgiks on sotsiaalsete gruppide moodustamine kasutades näotuvastustehnoloogiat. CroudSTag-i realisatsioon kasutab mobiilseid pilveteenuseid ja Mobile Host'i, et pakkuda oma funktsionaalsust kasutajale.In the last lustrum the mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, smart phones, tablets, etc. have pervaded almost all the environments where people perform their day-to-day activities. Further, the extensive Research and Development in mobile technologies has led to significant improvements in hardware, software and transmission. Similarly, there are significant developments and standardization efforts in web services domain and basic web services have been widely accessed from smart phones. This has lead to the logical next step of providing web services from the smart phones. The concept of the web service provisioning from smart phones is not new and has been extensively explored by Srirama who proposed the concept of Mobile Host. However, the original implementation considered aged technologies such as JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP architecture among others. This work updates the Mobile Host to the latest technologies like Android OS and REST architecture and proposes a service engine based on Apache Felix, and OSGI implementation for resource constraint devices. Moreover, the astonishing speed in developments in mobile computing enable the new generation of applications from domains such as context-awareness, social network, collaborative tools, location based services, etc., which benefit from the Mobile Host service provisioning capabilities. As a result the clients have access to a huge number of services available; therefore, an efficient and effective service discovery mechanism is required. The thesis proposes a directory-based with network overlay support discovery mechanism for large networks with high mobility. The proposed discovery mechanism relies in OWL-S, an ontology for service discovery, invocation, composition, and monitoring of web resources. The work also considers the original service discovery mechanism proposed by Srirama relying in peer-to-peer networks and Apache Lucene, a keyword search engine. The study updates the service search to Apache Solr, the latest development for Apache Lucene. The service discovery was extensively tested and the results are summarized in this work. Mobile technologies are looking into the clouds for extending their capabilities in storage and processing by offloading data and process intensive tasks. This fosters the development of more complex and rich mobile applications. However, due to the time-consuming nature of the tasks delegated to the clouds, an asynchronous mechanism is necessary for notifying the user when the intensive tasks are completed. Mobile cloud service providers and Middleware solutions might benefit from Mobile Host and its asynchronous notification capabilities. The study presents four push notification mechanisms being AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT and Mobile Host based push notification. The work summarizes the results of a quantitative analysis and highlights the strengths and weakness of the four notifications approaches. In addition, it explains CroudSTag realization, a mobile application that aims the social group formation by means of facial recognition that relies in mobile cloud services and Mobile Host to provide its functionality to the user

On service optimization in community network micro-clouds

Cotutela Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya i KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyInternet coverage in the world is still weak and local communities are required to come together and build their own network infrastructures. People collaborate for the common goal of accessing the Internet and cloud services by building Community networks (CNs). The use of Internet cloud services has grown over the last decade. Community network cloud infrastructures (i.e. micro-clouds) have been introduced to run services inside the network, without the need to consume them from the Internet. CN micro-clouds aims for not only an improved service performance, but also an entry point for an alternative to Internet cloud services in CNs. However, the adaptation of the services to be used in CN micro-clouds have their own challenges since the use of low-capacity devices and wireless connections without a central management is predominant in CNs. Further, large and irregular topology of the network, high software and hardware diversity and different service requirements in CNs, makes the CN micro-clouds a challenging environment to run local services, and to achieve service performance and quality similar to Internet cloud services. In this thesis, our main objective is the optimization of services (performance, quality) in CN micro-clouds, facilitating entrance to other services and motivating members to make use of CN micro-cloud services as an alternative to Internet services. We present an approach to handle services in CN micro-cloud environments in order to improve service performance and quality that can be approximated to Internet services, while also giving to the community motivation to use CN micro-cloud services. Furthermore, we break the problem into different levels (resource, service and middleware), propose a model that provides improvements for each level and contribute with information that helps to support the improvements (in terms of service performance and quality) in the other levels. At the resource level, we facilitate the use of community devices by utilizing virtualization techniques that isolate and manage CN micro-cloud services in order to have a multi-purpose environment that fosters services in the CN micro-cloud environment. At the service level, we build a monitoring tool tailored for CN micro-clouds that helps us to analyze service behavior and performance in CN micro-clouds. Subsequently, the information gathered enables adaptation of the services to the environment in order to improve their quality and performance under CN environments. At the middleware level, we build overlay networks as the main communication system according to the social information in order to improve paths and routes of the nodes, and improve transmission of data across the network by utilizing the relationships already established in the social network or community of practices that are related to the CNs. Therefore, service performance in CN micro-clouds can become more stable with respect to resource usage, performance and user perceived quality.Acceder a Internet sigue siendo un reto en muchas partes del mundo y las comunidades locales se ven en la necesidad de colaborar para construir sus propias infraestructuras de red. Los usuarios colaboran por el objetivo común de acceder a Internet y a los servicios en la nube construyendo redes comunitarias (RC). El uso de servicios de Internet en la nube ha crecido durante la última década. Las infraestructuras de nube en redes comunitarias (i.e., micronubes) han aparecido para albergar servicios dentro de las mismas redes, sin tener que acceder a Internet para usarlos. Las micronubes de las RC no solo tienen por objetivo ofrecer un mejor rendimiento, sino también ser la puerta de entrada en las RC hacia una alternativa a los servicios de Internet en la nube. Sin embargo, la adaptación de los servicios para ser usados en micronubes de RC conlleva sus retos ya que el uso de dispositivos de recursos limitados y de conexiones inalámbricas sin una gestión centralizada predominan en las RC. Más aún, la amplia e irregular topología de la red, la diversidad en el hardware y el software y los diferentes requisitos de los servicios en RC convierten en un desafío albergar servicios locales en micronubes de RC y obtener un rendimiento y una calidad del servicio comparables a los servicios de Internet en la nube. Esta tesis tiene por objetivo la optimización de servicios (rendimiento, calidad) en micronubes de RC, facilitando la entrada a otros servicios y motivando a sus miembros a usar los servicios en la micronube de RC como una alternativa a los servicios en Internet. Presentamos una aproximación para gestionar los servicios en entornos de micronube de RC para mejorar su rendimiento y calidad comparable a los servicios en Internet, a la vez que proporcionamos a la comunidad motivación para usar los servicios de micronube en RC. Además, dividimos el problema en distintos niveles (recursos, servicios y middleware), proponemos un modelo que proporciona mejoras para cada nivel y contribuye con información que apoya las mejoras (en términos de rendimiento y calidad de los servicios) en los otros niveles. En el nivel de los recursos, facilitamos el uso de dispositivos comunitarios al emplear técnicas de virtualización que aíslan y gestionan los servicios en micronubes de RC para obtener un entorno multipropósito que fomenta los servicios en el entorno de micronube de RC. En el nivel de servicio, construimos una herramienta de monitorización a la medida de las micronubes de RC que nos ayuda a analizar el comportamiento de los servicios y su rendimiento en micronubes de RC. Luego, la información recopilada permite adaptar los servicios al entorno para mejorar su calidad y rendimiento bajo las condiciones de una RC. En el nivel de middleware, construimos redes de overlay que actúan como el sistema de comunicación principal de acuerdo a información social para mejorar los caminos y las rutas de los nodos y mejoramos la transmisión de datos a lo largo de la red al utilizar las relaciones preestablecidas en la red social o la comunidad de prácticas que están relacionadas con las RC. De este modo, el rendimiento en las micronubes de RC puede devenir más estable respecto al uso de recursos, el rendimiento y la calidad percibidas por el usuario.Postprint (published version

A Peer-to-Peer Network Framework Utilising the Public Mobile Telephone Network

P2P (Peer-to-Peer) technologies are well established and have now become accepted as a mainstream networking approach. However, the explosion of participating users has not been replicated within the mobile networking domain. Until recently the lack of suitable hardware and wireless network infrastructure to support P2P activities was perceived as contributing to the problem. This has changed with ready availability of handsets having ample processing resources utilising an almost ubiquitous mobile telephone network. Coupled with this has been a proliferation of software applications written for the more capable `smartphone' handsets. P2P systems have not naturally integrated and evolved into the mobile telephone ecosystem in a way that `client-server' operating techniques have. However as the number of clients for a particular mobile application increase, providing the `server side' data storage infrastructure becomes more onerous. P2P systems offer mobile telephone applications a way to circumvent this data storage issue by dispersing it across a network of the participating users handsets. The main goal of this work was to produce a P2P Application Framework that supports developers in creating mobile telephone applications that use distributed storage. Effort was assigned to determining appropriate design requirements for a mobile handset based P2P system. Some of these requirements are related to the limitations of the host hardware, such as power consumption. Others relate to the network upon which the handsets operate, such as connectivity. The thesis reviews current P2P technologies to assess which was viable to form the technology foundations for the framework. The aim was not to re-invent a P2P system design, rather to adopt an existing one for mobile operation. Built upon the foundations of a prototype application, the P2P framework resulting from modifications and enhancements grants access via a simple API (Applications Programmer Interface) to a subset of Nokia `smartphone' devices. Unhindered operation across all mobile telephone networks is possible through a proprietary application implementing NAT (Network Address Translation) traversal techniques. Recognising that handsets operate with limited resources, further optimisation of the P2P framework was also investigated. Energy consumption was a parameter chosen for further examination because of its impact on handset participation time. This work has proven that operating applications in conjunction with a P2P data storage framework, connected via the mobile telephone network, is technically feasible. It also shows that opportunity remains for further research to realise the full potential of this data storage technique

Flexible Application-Layer Multicast in Heterogeneous Networks

This work develops a set of peer-to-peer-based protocols and extensions in order to provide Internet-wide group communication. The focus is put to the question how different access technologies can be integrated in order to face the growing traffic load problem. Thereby, protocols are developed that allow autonomous adaptation to the current network situation on the one hand and the integration of WiFi domains where applicable on the other hand