Content-Aware Multimedia Communications

The demands for fast, economic and reliable dissemination of multimedia information are steadily growing within our society. While people and economy increasingly rely on communication technologies, engineers still struggle with their growing complexity. Complexity in multimedia communication originates from several sources. The most prominent is the unreliability of packet networks like the Internet. Recent advances in scheduling and error control mechanisms for streaming protocols have shown that the quality and robustness of multimedia delivery can be improved significantly when protocols are aware of the content they deliver. However, the proposed mechanisms require close cooperation between transport systems and application layers which increases the overall system complexity. Current approaches also require expensive metrics and focus on special encoding formats only. A general and efficient model is missing so far. This thesis presents efficient and format-independent solutions to support cross-layer coordination in system architectures. In particular, the first contribution of this work is a generic dependency model that enables transport layers to access content-specific properties of media streams, such as dependencies between data units and their importance. The second contribution is the design of a programming model for streaming communication and its implementation as a middleware architecture. The programming model hides the complexity of protocol stacks behind simple programming abstractions, but exposes cross-layer control and monitoring options to application programmers. For example, our interfaces allow programmers to choose appropriate failure semantics at design time while they can refine error protection and visibility of low-level errors at run-time. Based on some examples we show how our middleware simplifies the integration of stream-based communication into large-scale application architectures. An important result of this work is that despite cross-layer cooperation, neither application nor transport protocol designers experience an increase in complexity. Application programmers can even reuse existing streaming protocols which effectively increases system robustness.Der Bedarf unsere Gesellschaft nach kostengünstiger und zuverlässiger Kommunikation wächst stetig. Während wir uns selbst immer mehr von modernen Kommunikationstechnologien abhängig machen, müssen die Ingenieure dieser Technologien sowohl den Bedarf nach schneller Einführung neuer Produkte befriedigen als auch die wachsende Komplexität der Systeme beherrschen. Gerade die Übertragung multimedialer Inhalte wie Video und Audiodaten ist nicht trivial. Einer der prominentesten Gründe dafür ist die Unzuverlässigkeit heutiger Netzwerke, wie z.B.~dem Internet. Paketverluste und schwankende Laufzeiten können die Darstellungsqualität massiv beeinträchtigen. Wie jüngste Entwicklungen im Bereich der Streaming-Protokolle zeigen, sind jedoch Qualität und Robustheit der Übertragung effizient kontrollierbar, wenn Streamingprotokolle Informationen über den Inhalt der transportierten Daten ausnutzen. Existierende Ansätze, die den Inhalt von Multimediadatenströmen beschreiben, sind allerdings meist auf einzelne Kompressionsverfahren spezialisiert und verwenden berechnungsintensive Metriken. Das reduziert ihren praktischen Nutzen deutlich. Außerdem erfordert der Informationsaustausch eine enge Kooperation zwischen Applikationen und Transportschichten. Da allerdings die Schnittstellen aktueller Systemarchitekturen nicht darauf vorbereitet sind, müssen entweder die Schnittstellen erweitert oder alternative Architekturkonzepte geschaffen werden. Die Gefahr beider Varianten ist jedoch, dass sich die Komplexität eines Systems dadurch weiter erhöhen kann. Das zentrale Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es deshalb, schichtenübergreifende Koordination bei gleichzeitiger Reduzierung der Komplexität zu erreichen. Hier leistet die Arbeit zwei Beträge zum aktuellen Stand der Forschung. Erstens definiert sie ein universelles Modell zur Beschreibung von Inhaltsattributen, wie Wichtigkeiten und Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen innerhalb eines Datenstroms. Transportschichten können dieses Wissen zur effizienten Fehlerkontrolle verwenden. Zweitens beschreibt die Arbeit das Noja Programmiermodell für multimediale Middleware. Noja definiert Abstraktionen zur Übertragung und Kontrolle multimedialer Ströme, die die Koordination von Streamingprotokollen mit Applikationen ermöglichen. Zum Beispiel können Programmierer geeignete Fehlersemantiken und Kommunikationstopologien auswählen und den konkreten Fehlerschutz dann zur Laufzeit verfeinern und kontrolliere

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

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. pressurises 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: adaptation, energy efficiency and 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

Cross-layer optimization of a multimedia streaming system via dynamic programming

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of efficient video streaming to mobile users. A cross-layer optimization of various parameters of the coding and transmission chain (coding parameters, buffer management, AC-layer management) is performed to account for the time-varying nature of the characteristics of the transmitted contents and of the wireless channel. The problem is cast in the framework of Markov Decision Processes (MDP). This formalism provides efficient tools to compute a foresighted control policy maximizing some long term discounted sum of rewards linked to the video quality received by the user. Experimental results illustrate the benefits in terms of average PSNR of this approach compared to a short-term (myopic) policy. The robustness of the proposed control policy to variations of the transmitted contents is also illustrated

Enhancing quality-of-service conditions using a cross-layer paradigm for ad-hoc vehicular communication

The Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) is an emerging paradigm aiming to introduce a plethora of innovative applications and services that impose a certain quality of service (QoS) requirements. The IoV mainly relies on vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) for autonomous inter-vehicle communication and road-traffic safety management. With the ever-increasing demand to design new and emerging applications for VANETs, one challenge that continues to stand out is the provision of acceptable QoS requirements to particular user applications. Most existing solutions to this challenge rely on a single layer of the protocol stack. This paper presents a cross-layer decision-based routing protocol that necessitates choosing the best multi-hop path for packet delivery to meet acceptable QoS requirements. The proposed protocol acquires the information about the channel rate from the physical layer and incorporates this information in decision making, while directing traffic at the network layer level. Key performance metrics for the system design are analyzed using extensive experimental simulation scenarios. In addition, three data rate variant solutions are proposed to cater for various application-specific requirements in highways and urban environments. © 2013 IEEE

Simulation and experimental testbed for adaptive video streaming in ad hoc networks

[EN] This paper presents a performance evaluation of the scalable video streaming over mobile ad hoc networks. In particular, we focus on the rate-adaptive method for streaming scalable video (H.264/SVC). For effective adaptation a new cross-layer routing protocol is introduced. This protocol provides an efficient algorithm for available bandwidth estimation. With this information, the video source adjusts its bit rate during the video transmission according to the network state. We also propose a free simulation framework that supports evaluation studies for scalable video streaming. The simulation experiments performed in this study involve the transmission of SVC streams with Medium Grain Scalability (MGS) as well as temporal scalability over different network scenarios. The results reveal that the rate-adaptive strategy helps avoid or reduce the congestion in MANETs obtaining a better quality in the received videos. Additionally, an actual ad hoc network was implemented using embedded devices (Raspberry Pi) in order to assess the performance of the proposed adaptive transmission mechanism in a real environment. Additional experiments were carried out prior to the implementation with the aim of characterizing the wireless medium and packet loss profile. Finally, the proposed approach shows an important reduction in energy consumption, as the study revealed.This paper was performed with the support of the National Secretary of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT)–Ecuador Government (scholarship 195-2012) and the Multimedia Communications Group (COMM) belong to the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM)-Universitat Politècnica de València.Gonzalez-Martinez, SR.; Castellanos Hernández, WE.; Guzmán Castillo, PF.; Arce Vila, P.; Guerri Cebollada, JC. (2016). Simulation and experimental testbed for adaptive video streaming in ad hoc networks. Ad Hoc Networks. 52:89-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2016.07.007S891055