Service Migration from Cloud to Multi-tier Fog Nodes for Multimedia Dissemination with QoE Support.

A wide range of multimedia services is expected to be offered for mobile users via various wireless access networks. Even the integration of Cloud Computing in such networks does not support an adequate Quality of Experience (QoE) in areas with high demands for multimedia contents. Fog computing has been conceptualized to facilitate the deployment of new services that cloud computing cannot provide, particularly those demanding QoE guarantees. These services are provided using fog nodes located at the network edge, which is capable of virtualizing their functions/applications. Service migration from the cloud to fog nodes can be actuated by request patterns and the timing issues. To the best of our knowledge, existing works on fog computing focus on architecture and fog node deployment issues. In this article, we describe the operational impacts and benefits associated with service migration from the cloud to multi-tier fog computing for video distribution with QoE support. Besides that, we perform the evaluation of such service migration of video services. Finally, we present potential research challenges and trends

Enabling Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Stored Video Streaming Service with QoS Support

This research aims to enable a large-scale, high-volume, peer-to-peer, stored-video streaming service over the Internet, such as on-line DVD rentals. P2P allows a group of dynamically organized users to cooperatively support content discovery and distribution services without needing to employ a central server. P2P has the potential to overcome the scalability issue associated with client-server based video distribution networks; however, it brings a new set of challenges. This research addresses the following five technical challenges associated with the distribution of streaming video over the P2P network: 1) allow users with limited transmit bandwidth capacity to become contributing sources, 2) support the advertisement and discovery of time-changing and time-bounded video frame availability, 3) Minimize the impact of distribution source losses during video playback, 4) incorporate user mobility information in the selection of distribution sources, and 5) design a streaming network architecture that enables above functionalities.To meet the above requirements, we propose a video distribution network model based on a hybrid architecture between client-server and P2P. In this model, a video is divided into a sequence of small segments and each user executes a scheduling algorithm to determine the order, the timing, and the rate of segment retrievals from other users. The model also employs an advertisement and discovery scheme which incorporates parameters of the scheduling algorithm to allow users to share their life-time of video segment availability information in one advertisement and one query. An accompanying QoS scheme allows reduction in the number of video playback interruptions while one or more distribution sources depart from the service prematurely.The simulation study shows that the proposed model and associated schemes greatly alleviate the bandwidth requirement of the video distribution server, especially when the number of participating users grows large. As much as 90% of load reduction was observed in some experiments when compared to a traditional client-server based video distribution service. A significant reduction is also observed in the number of video presentation interruptions when the proposed QoS scheme is incorporated in the distribution process while certain percentages of distribution sources depart from the service unexpectedly

On the Optimization of BitTorrent-Like Protocols for Interactive On-Demand Streaming Systems

This paper proposes two novel optimized BitTorrent-like protocols for interactive multimedia streaming: the Simple Interactive Streaming Protocol (SISP) and the Exclusive Interactive Streaming Protocol (EISP). The former chiefly seeks a trade-off between playback continuity and data diversity, while the latter is mostly focused on playback continuity. To assure a thorough and up-to-date approach, related work is carefully examined and important open issues, concerning the design of BitTorrent-like algorithms, are analyzed as well. Through simulations, in a variety of near-real file replication scenarios, the novel protocols are evaluated using distinct performance metrics. Among the major findings, the final results show that the two novel proposals are efficient and, besides, focusing on playback continuity ends up being the best design concept to achieve high quality of service. Lastly, avenues for further research are included at the end of this paper as well.Comment: 20 page

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

STEER: Exploring the dynamic relationship between social information and networked media through experimentation

With the growing popularity of social networks, online video services and smart phones, the traditional content consumers are becoming the editors and broadcasters of their own stories. Within the EU FP7 project STEER, project partners have developed a novel system of new algorithms and toolsets that extract and analyse social informatics generated by social networks. Combined with advanced networking technologies, the platform creates services that offer more personalized and accurate content discovery and retrieval services. The STEER system has been deployed in multiple geographical locations during live social events such as the 2014 Winter Olympics. Our use case experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the underlying technologies

Live Streaming in P2P and Hybrid P2P-Cloud Environments for the Open Internet

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live media streaming is an emerging technology that reduces the barrier to stream live events over the Internet. However, providing a high quality media stream using P2P overlay networks is challenging and gives raise to a number of issues: (i) how to guarantee quality of the service (QoS) in the presence of dynamism, (ii) how to incentivize nodes to participate in media distribution, (iii) how to avoid bottlenecks in the overlay, and (iv) how to deal with nodes that reside behind Network Address Translators gateways (NATs). In this thesis, we answer the above research questions in form of new algorithms and systems. First of all, we address problems (i) and (ii) by presenting our P2P live media streaming solutions: Sepidar, which is a multiple-tree overlay, and GLive, which is a mesh overlay. In both models, nodes with higher upload bandwidth are positioned closer to the media source. This structure reduces the playback latency and increases the playback continuity at nodes, and also incentivizes the nodes to provide more upload bandwidth. We use a reputation model to improve participating nodes in media distribution in Sepidar and GLive. In both systems, nodes audit the behaviour of their directly connected nodes by getting feedback from other nodes. Nodes who upload more of the stream get a relatively higher reputation, and proportionally higher quality streams. To construct our streaming overlay, we present a distributed market model inspired by Bertsekas auction algorithm, although our model does not rely on a central server with global knowledge. In our model, each node has only partial information about the system. Nodes acquire knowledge of the system by sampling nodes using the Gradient overlay, where it facilitates the discovery of nodes with similar upload bandwidth. We address the bottlenecks problem, problem (iii), by presenting CLive that satisfies real-time constraints on delay between the generation of the stream and its actual delivery to users. We resolve this problem by borrowing some resources (helpers) from the cloud, upon need. In our approach, helpers are added on demand to the overlay, to increase the amount of total available bandwidth, thus increasing the probability of receiving the video on time. As the use of cloud resources costs money, we model the problem as the minimization of the economical cost, provided that a set of constraints on QoS is satisfied. Finally, we solve the NAT problem, problem (iv), by presenting two NAT-aware peer sampling services (PSS): Gozar and Croupier. Traditional gossip-based PSS breaks down, where a high percentage of nodes are behind NATs. We overcome this problem in Gozar using one-hop relaying to communicate with the nodes behind NATs. Croupier similarly implements a gossip-based PSS, but without the use of relaying

Towards video streaming in IoT environments: vehicular communication perspective

Multimedia oriented Internet of Things (IoT) enables pervasive and real-time communication of video, audio and image data among devices in an immediate surroundings. Today's vehicles have the capability of supporting real time multimedia acquisition. Vehicles with high illuminating infrared cameras and customized sensors can communicate with other on-road devices using dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and 5G enabled communication technologies. Real time incidence of both urban and highway vehicular traffic environment can be captured and transmitted using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication modes. Video streaming in vehicular IoT (VSV-IoT) environments is in growing stage with several challenges that need to be addressed ranging from limited resources in IoT devices, intermittent connection in vehicular networks, heterogeneous devices, dynamism and scalability in video encoding, bandwidth underutilization in video delivery, and attaining application-precise quality of service in video streaming. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive review on video streaming in IoT environments focusing on vehicular communication perspective. Specifically, significance of video streaming in vehicular IoT environments is highlighted focusing on integration of vehicular communication with 5G enabled IoT technologies, and smart city oriented application areas for VSV-IoT. A taxonomy is presented for the classification of related literature on video streaming in vehicular network environments. Following the taxonomy, critical review of literature is performed focusing on major functional model, strengths and weaknesses. Metrics for video streaming in vehicular IoT environments are derived and comparatively analyzed in terms of their usage and evaluation capabilities. Open research challenges in VSV-IoT are identified as future directions of research in the area. The survey would benefit both IoT and vehicle industry practitioners and researchers, in terms of augmenting understanding of vehicular video streaming and its IoT related trends and issues

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

A policy-based framework towards smooth adaptive playback for dynamic video streaming over HTTP

The growth of video streaming in the Internet in the last few years has been highly significant and promises to continue in the future. This fact is related to the growth of Internet users and especially with the diversification of the end-user devices that happens nowadays. Earlier video streaming solutions didn´t consider adequately the Quality of Experience from the user’s perspective. This weakness has been since overcame with the DASH video streaming. The main feature of this protocol is to provide different versions, in terms of quality, of the same content. This way, depending on the status of the network infrastructure between the video server and the user device, the DASH protocol automatically selects the more adequate content version. Thus, it provides to the user the best possible quality for the consumption of that content. The main issue with the DASH protocol is associated to the loop, between each client and video server, which controls the rate of the video stream. In fact, as the network congestion increases, the client requests to the server a video stream with a lower rate. Nevertheless, due to the network latency, the DASH protocol in a standalone way may not be able to stabilize the video stream rate at a level that can guarantee a satisfactory QoE to the end-users. Network programming is a very active and popular topic in the field of network infrastructures management. In this area, the Software Defined Networking paradigm is an approach where a network controller, with a relatively abstracted view of the physical network infrastructure, tries to perform a more efficient management of the data path. The current work studies the combination of the DASH protocol and the Software Defined Networking paradigm in order to achieve a more adequate sharing of the network resources that could benefit both the users’ QoE and network management.O streaming de vídeo na Internet é um fenómeno que tem vindo a crescer de forma significativa nos últimos anos e que promete continuar a crescer no futuro. Este facto está associado ao aumento do número de utilizadores na Internet e, sobretudo, à crescente diversificação de dispositivos que se verifica atualmente. As primeiras soluções utilizadas no streaming de vídeo não acomodavam adequadamente o ponto de vista do utilizador na avaliação da qualidade do vídeo, i.e., a Qualidade de Experiência (QoE) do utilizador. Esta debilidade foi suplantada com o protocolo de streaming de vídeo adaptativo DASH. A principal funcionalidade deste protocolo é fornecer diferente versões, em termos de qualidade, para o mesmo conteúdo. Desta forma, dependendo do estado da infraestrutura de rede entre o servidor de vídeo e o dispositivo do utilizador, o protocolo DASH seleciona automaticamente a versão do conteúdo mais adequada a essas condições. Tal permite fornecer ao utilizador a melhor qualidade possível para o consumo deste conteúdo. O principal problema com o protocolo DASH está associado com o ciclo, entre cada cliente e o servidor de vídeo, que controla o débito de cada fluxo de vídeo. De facto, à medida que a rede fica congestionada, o cliente irá começar a requerer ao servidor um fluxo de vídeo com um débito menor. Ainda assim, devido à latência da rede, o protocolo DASH pode não ser capaz por si só de estabilizar o débito do fluxo de vídeo num nível que consiga garantir uma QoE satisfatória para os utilizadores. A programação de redes é uma área muito popular e ativa na gestão de infraestruturas de redes. Nesta área, o paradigma de Software Defined Networking é uma abordagem onde um controlador da rede, com um ponto de vista relativamente abstrato da infraestrutura física da rede, tenta desempenhar uma gestão mais eficiente do encaminhamento de rede. Neste trabalho estuda-se a junção do protocolo DASH e do paradigma de Software Defined Networking, de forma a atingir uma partilha mais adequada dos recursos da rede. O objetivo é implementar uma solução que seja benéfica tanto para a qualidade de experiência dos utilizadores como para a gestão da rede