Random Linear Network Coding for 5G Mobile Video Delivery

An exponential increase in mobile video delivery will continue with the demand for higher resolution, multi-view and large-scale multicast video services. Novel fifth generation (5G) 3GPP New Radio (NR) standard will bring a number of new opportunities for optimizing video delivery across both 5G core and radio access networks. One of the promising approaches for video quality adaptation, throughput enhancement and erasure protection is the use of packet-level random linear network coding (RLNC). In this review paper, we discuss the integration of RLNC into the 5G NR standard, building upon the ideas and opportunities identified in 4G LTE. We explicitly identify and discuss in detail novel 5G NR features that provide support for RLNC-based video delivery in 5G, thus pointing out to the promising avenues for future research.Comment: Invited paper for Special Issue "Network and Rateless Coding for Video Streaming" - MDPI Informatio

Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study

Distributed Coding/Decoding Complexity in Video Sensor Networks

Video Sensor Networks (VSNs) are recent communication infrastructures used to capture and transmit dense visual information from an application context. In such large scale environments which include video coding, transmission and display/storage, there are several open problems to overcome in practical implementations. This paper addresses the most relevant challenges posed by VSNs, namely stringent bandwidth usage and processing time/power constraints. In particular, the paper proposes a novel VSN architecture where large sets of visual sensors with embedded processors are used for compression and transmission of coded streams to gateways, which in turn transrate the incoming streams and adapt them to the variable complexity requirements of both the sensor encoders and end-user decoder terminals. Such gateways provide real-time transcoding functionalities for bandwidth adaptation and coding/decoding complexity distribution by transferring the most complex video encoding/decoding tasks to the transcoding gateway at the expense of a limited increase in bit rate. Then, a method to reduce the decoding complexity, suitable for system-on-chip implementation, is proposed to operate at the transcoding gateway whenever decoders with constrained resources are targeted. The results show that the proposed method achieves good performance and its inclusion into the VSN infrastructure provides an additional level of complexity control functionality

TransCoding – From `Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture

Between 2014 and 2017, the artistic research project "TransCoding – From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture" encouraged creative participation in multimedia art via social media. Based on the artworks that emerged from the project, Barbara Lüneburg investigates authorship, authority, motivational factors, and aesthetics in participatory art created with the help of web 2.0 technology. The interdisciplinary approach includes perspectives from sociology, cultural and media studies, and offers an exclusive view and analysis from the inside through the method of artistic research. In addition, the study documents selected community projects and the creation processes of the artworks Slices of Life and Read me

Quality of experience-centric management of adaptive video streaming services : status and challenges

Video streaming applications currently dominate Internet traffic. Particularly, HTTP Adaptive Streaming ( HAS) has emerged as the dominant standard for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet, thanks to its capability of matching the video quality to the available network resources. In HAS, the video client is equipped with a heuristic that dynamically decides the most suitable quality to stream the content, based on information such as the perceived network bandwidth or the video player buffer status. The goal of this heuristic is to optimize the quality as perceived by the user, the so-called Quality of Experience (QoE). Despite the many advantages brought by the adaptive streaming principle, optimizing users' QoE is far from trivial. Current heuristics are still suboptimal when sudden bandwidth drops occur, especially in wireless environments, thus leading to freezes in the video playout, the main factor influencing users' QoE. This issue is aggravated in case of live events, where the player buffer has to be kept as small as possible in order to reduce the playout delay between the user and the live signal. In light of the above, in recent years, several works have been proposed with the aim of extending the classical purely client-based structure of adaptive video streaming, in order to fully optimize users' QoE. In this article, a survey is presented of research works on this topic together with a classification based on where the optimization takes place. This classification goes beyond client-based heuristics to investigate the usage of server-and network-assisted architectures and of new application and transport layer protocols. In addition, we outline the major challenges currently arising in the field of multimedia delivery, which are going to be of extreme relevance in future years

Lirolem: A virtual studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln

Gives an account of the Lirolem project at the University of Lincoln which was to build a repository capable of handling multimedia material as well as providing a repository for the University's research output