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

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

A Scalable Solution For Interactive Video Streaming

This dissertation presents an overall solution for interactive Near Video On Demand (NVOD) systems, where limited server and network resources prevent the system from servicing all customers’ requests. The interactive nature of recent workloads complicates matters further. Interactive requests require additional resources to be handled. This dissertation analyzes the system performance under a realistic workload using different stream merging techniques and scheduling policies. It considers a wide range of system parameters and studies their impact on the waiting and blocking metrics. In order to improve waiting customers experience, we propose a new scheduling policy for waiting customers that is fairer and delivers a descent performance. Blocking is a major issue in interactive NVOD systems and we propose a few techniques to minimize it. In particular, we study the maximum Interactive Stream (I-Stream) length (Threshold) that should be allowed in order to prevent a few requests from using the expensive I-Streams for a prolonged period of time, which starves other requests from a chance of using this valuable resource. Using a reasonable I-Stream threshold proves very effective in improving blocking metrics. Moreover, we introduce an I-Stream provisioning policy to dynamically shift resources based on the system requirements at the time. The proposed policy proves to be highly effective in improving the overall system performance. To account for both average waiting time and average blocking time, we introduce a new metric (Aggregate Delay) . We study the client-side cache management policy. We utilize the customer’s cache to service most interactive requests, which reduces the load on the server. We propose three purging algorithms to clear data when the cache gets full. Purge Oldest removes the oldest data in the cache, whereas Purge Furthest clears the furthest data from the client’s playback point. In contrast, Adaptive Purge tries to avoid purging any data that includes the customer’s playback point or the playback point of any stream that is being listened to by the client. Additionally, we study the impact of the purge block, which is the least amount of data to be cleared, on the system performance. Finally, we study the effect of bookmarking on the system performance. A video segment that is searched and watched repeatedly is called a hotspot and is pointed to by a bookmark. We introduce three enhancements to effectively support bookmarking. Specifically, we propose a new purging algorithm to avoid purging hotspot data if it is already cached. On top of that, we fetch hotspot data for customers not listening to any stream. Furthermore, we reserve multicast channels to fetch hotspot data

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

vSkyConf: Cloud-assisted Multi-party Mobile Video Conferencing

As an important application in the busy world today, mobile video conferencing facilitates virtual face-to-face communication with friends, families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A fully decentralized, optimal algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths, such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with optimal stream distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast solutions.Comment: 10 page

Management of Digital Video Broadcasting Services in Open Delivery Platforms

The future of Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is moving towards solutions offering an efficient way of carrying interactive IP multimedia services over digital terrestrial broadcasting networks to handheld terminals. One of the most promising technologies is Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H), at present under standardisation. Services deployed via this type of DVB technologies should enjoy reliability comparable to TV services and high quality standards. However, the market at present does not provide effective and economical solutions for the deployment of such services over multi-domain IP networks, due to their high level of unreliability. This paper focuses on service management, service level agreement (SLA) and network performance requirements of DVB-H services. Experimental results are presented concerning QoS sensitivity to network performance of DVB-H services delivered over a multi-domain IP network. Moreover, a solution for efficient and cost effective service management via QoS monitoring and control and network SLA design is proposed. The solution gives DVB-H operators the possibility of fully managing service QoS without being tied to third party operators