Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

Machine Learning for Multimedia Communications

Machine learning is revolutionizing the way multimedia information is processed and transmitted to users. After intensive and powerful training, some impressive efficiency/accuracy improvements have been made all over the transmission pipeline. For example, the high model capacity of the learning-based architectures enables us to accurately model the image and video behavior such that tremendous compression gains can be achieved. Similarly, error concealment, streaming strategy or even user perception modeling have widely benefited from the recent learningoriented developments. However, learning-based algorithms often imply drastic changes to the way data are represented or consumed, meaning that the overall pipeline can be affected even though a subpart of it is optimized. In this paper, we review the recent major advances that have been proposed all across the transmission chain, and we discuss their potential impact and the research challenges that they raise

Adaptive subframe allocation for next generation multimedia delivery over hybrid LTE unicast broadcast

The continued global roll-out of long term evolution (LTE) networks is providing mobile users with perpetually increasing ubiquitous access to a rich selection of high quality multimedia. Interactive viewing experiences including 3-D or free-viewpoint video require the synchronous delivery of multiple video streams. This paper presents a novel hybrid unicast broadcast synchronisation (HUBS) framework to synchronously deliver multi-stream content. Previous techniques on hybrid LTE implementations include staggered modulation and coding scheme grouping, adaptive modulation coding or implementing error recover techniques; the work presented here instead focuses on dynamic allocation of resources between unicast and broadcast, improving stream synchronisation as well as overall cell resource usage. Furthermore, the HUBS framework has been developed to work within the limitations imposed by the LTE specification. Performance evaluation of the framework is performed through the simulation of probable future scenarios, where a popular live event is broadcast with stereo 3-D or multi-angle companion views interactively offered to capable users. The proposed framework forms a ``HUBS group'' that monitors the radio bearer queues to establish a time lead or lag between broadcast and unicast streams. Since unicast and broadcast share the same radio resources, the number of subframes allocated to the broadcast transmission are then dynamically increased or decreased to minimise the average lead/lag time offset between the streams. Dynamic allocation showed improvements for all services across the cell, whilst keeping streams synchronised despite increased user loading

Effective radio resource management for multimedia broadcast/multicast services in UMTS networks

WOS:000242097300001 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)Broadcast and multicast offer a significant improvement of spectrum utilization, and become particularly important where information channels are shared among several users. Mobile cellular environments are expected to evolve with the technological approaches necessary to facilitate the deployment of multimedia services, such as streaming, file download, and carousel services. The perspective that video streaming in wireless networks services is an attractive service to end-users has spurred the research in this area. To provide for a video delivery platform in UMTS, the third generation partnership project (3GPP) addressed this problem with the introduction of the multimedia broadcast and multicast services (MBMS) in 3GPP Release 6. In this document we analyse several effective radio resource management techniques to provide MBMS, namely, use of nonuniform QAM constellations, multicode, and macrodiversity to guarantee the optimal distribution of QoS depending on the location of mobiles.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

VOIP WITH ADAPTIVE RATE IN MULTI- TRANSMISSION RATE WIRELESS LANS

“Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)” is a popular communication technology that plays a vital role in term of cost reduction and flexibility. However, like any emerging technology, there are still some issues with VoIP, namely providing good Quality of Service (QoS), capacity consideration and providing security. This study focuses on the QoS issue of VoIP, specifically in “Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN)”. IEEE 802.11 is the most popular standard of wireless LANs and it offers different transmission rates for wireless channels. Different transmission rates are associated with varying available bandwidth that shall influence the transmission of VoIP traffic

Seamless Multimedia Delivery Within a Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Environment: Are We There Yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurizes the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of quality of experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty, and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users' quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: 1) adaptation; 2) energy efficiency; and 3) multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges, and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided