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

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

A Survey on Handover Management in Mobility Architectures

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the "future" Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer

Exploring traffic and QoS management mechanisms to support mobile cloud computing using service localisation in heterogeneous environments

In recent years, mobile devices have evolved to support an amalgam of multimedia applications and content. However, the small size of these devices poses a limit the amount of local computing resources. The emergence of Cloud technology has set the ground for an era of task offloading for mobile devices and we are now seeing the deployment of applications that make more extensive use of Cloud processing as a means of augmenting the capabilities of mobiles. Mobile Cloud Computing is the term used to describe the convergence of these technologies towards applications and mechanisms that offload tasks from mobile devices to the Cloud. In order for mobile devices to access Cloud resources and successfully offload tasks there, a solution for constant and reliable connectivity is required. The proliferation of wireless technology ensures that networks are available almost everywhere in an urban environment and mobile devices can stay connected to a network at all times. However, user mobility is often the cause of intermittent connectivity that affects the performance of applications and ultimately degrades the user experience. 5th Generation Networks are introducing mechanisms that enable constant and reliable connectivity through seamless handovers between networks and provide the foundation for a tighter coupling between Cloud resources and mobiles. This convergence of technologies creates new challenges in the areas of traffic management and QoS provisioning. The constant connectivity to and reliance of mobile devices on Cloud resources have the potential of creating large traffic flows between networks. Furthermore, depending on the type of application generating the traffic flow, very strict QoS may be required from the networks as suboptimal performance may severely degrade an application’s functionality. In this thesis, I propose a new service delivery framework, centred on the convergence of Mobile Cloud Computing and 5G networks for the purpose of optimising service delivery in a mobile environment. The framework is used as a guideline for identifying different aspects of service delivery in a mobile environment and for providing a path for future research in this field. The focus of the thesis is placed on the service delivery mechanisms that are responsible for optimising the QoS and managing network traffic. I present a solution for managing traffic through dynamic service localisation according to user mobility and device connectivity. I implement a prototype of the solution in a virtualised environment as a proof of concept and demonstrate the functionality and results gathered from experimentation. Finally, I present a new approach to modelling network performance by taking into account user mobility. The model considers the overall performance of a persistent connection as the mobile node switches between different networks. Results from the model can be used to determine which networks will negatively affect application performance and what impact they will have for the duration of the user's movement. The proposed model is evaluated using an analytical approac