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

Wireless Heterogeneous Networks and Next Generation Internet

The recent advances in wireless access technologies as well as the increasing number of mobile applications have made Wireless Internet a reality. A wide variety of bandwidth demanding services including high speed data delivery and multimedia communication have been materialized through the convergence of the next generation Internet and heterogeneous wireless networks. However, providing even higher bandwidth and richer applications necessitates a fundamental understanding of wireless Internet architecture and the interactions between heterogeneous users. Consequently, fundamental advances in many concepts of the wireless Internet are required for the ultimate goal of communication anytime anywhere. This special issue of the ACM Mobile Networks and Applications Journal is dedicated to the recent advances in the area of Wireless Internet. We accepted 10 papers out of 59 submissions from all over the world with a 17% acceptance rate. Papers describing management schemes, protocols, models, evaluation methods, and experimental studies of Wireless Internet are included in this special issue to provide a broad view of recent advances in this field

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

Towards Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions

The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as eMBB, mMTC and URLLC, mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include QoS provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead and Radio Access Network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy Random Access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and NB-IoT. Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions towards addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges and use cases for the applications of emerging Machine Learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity Q-learning approach in the mMTC scenarios. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables, submitted for a possible future publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Resilient availability and bandwidth-aware multipath provisioning for media transfer over the internet (Best Paper Award)

Traditional routing in the Internet is best-effort. Path differentiation including multipath routing is a promising technique to be used for meeting QoS requirements of media intensive applications. Since different paths have different characteristics in terms of latency, availability and bandwidth, they offer flexibility in QoS and congestion control. Additionally protection techniques can be used to enhance the reliability of the network. This paper studies the problem of how to optimally find paths ensuring maximal bandwidth and resiliency of media transfer over the network. In particular, we propose two algorithms to reserve network paths with minimal new resources while increasing the availability of the paths and enabling congestion control. The first algorithm is based on Integer Linear Programming which minimizes the cost of the paths and the used resources. The second one is a heuristic-based algorithm which solves the scalability limitations of the ILP approach. The algorithms ensure resiliency against any single link failure in the network. The experimental results indicate that using the proposed schemes the connections availability improve significantly and a more balanced load is achieved in the network compared to the shortest path-based approaches

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

Autonomous QoS Management and Policing in Unmanaged Local Area Networks

The high increase of bandwidth-intensive applications like high definition video streaming in home and small office environments leads to QoS challenges in hybrid wired/wireless local area networks. These networks are often not QoS aware and may contain bottlenecks in their topology. In addition, they often have a hybrid nature due to the used access technology consisting of, for example, Ethernet, wireless, and PowerLAN links. In this paper, we present the research work on a novel autonomous system for hybrid QoS in local area networks, called QoSiLAN, which does not rely on network infrastructure support but on host cooperation and works independently of the access technology. We present a new QoS Signalling Protocol, policing and admission control algorithms, and a new lightweight statistical bandwidth prediction algorithm for autonomous resource management in LANs. This new QoS framework enables link based, access-medium independent bandwidth management without network support. We provide evaluation results for the novel bandwidth prediction algorithm as well as for the QoSiLAN framework and its protocol, which highlight the features, robustness, and the effectiveness of the proposed system