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

Multicast Mobility in Mobile IP Version 6 (MIPv6) : Problem Statement and Brief Survey

Publisher PD

Network overload avoidance by traffic engineering and content caching

The Internet traffic volume continues to grow at a great rate, now driven by video and TV distribution. For network operators it is important to avoid congestion in the network, and to meet service level agreements with their customers. This thesis presents work on two methods operators can use to reduce links loads in their networks: traffic engineering and content caching. This thesis studies access patterns for TV and video and the potential for caching. The investigation is done both using simulation and by analysis of logs from a large TV-on-Demand system over four months. The results show that there is a small set of programs that account for a large fraction of the requests and that a comparatively small local cache can be used to significantly reduce the peak link loads during prime time. The investigation also demonstrates how the popularity of programs changes over time and shows that the access pattern in a TV-on-Demand system very much depends on the content type. For traffic engineering the objective is to avoid congestion in the network and to make better use of available resources by adapting the routing to the current traffic situation. The main challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands. This thesis proposes L-balanced routings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level L. L-balanced routing gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic. We present an L-balanced routing algorithm and a heuristic search method for finding L-balanced weight settings for the legacy routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. We show that the search and the resulting weight settings work well in real network scenarios

Ontwerp en evaluatie van content distributie netwerken voor multimediale streaming diensten.

Traditionele Internetgebaseerde diensten voor het verspreiden van bestanden, zoals Web browsen en het versturen van e-mails, worden aangeboden via één centrale server. Meer recente netwerkdiensten zoals interactieve digitale televisie of video-op-aanvraag vereisen echter hoge kwaliteitsgaranties (QoS), zoals een lage en constante netwerkvertraging, en verbruiken een aanzienlijke hoeveelheid bandbreedte op het netwerk. Architecturen met één centrale server kunnen deze garanties moeilijk bieden en voldoen daarom niet meer aan de hoge eisen van de volgende generatie multimediatoepassingen. In dit onderzoek worden daarom nieuwe netwerkarchitecturen bestudeerd, die een dergelijke dienstkwaliteit kunnen ondersteunen. Zowel peer-to-peer mechanismes, zoals bij het uitwisselen van muziekbestanden tussen eindgebruikers, als servergebaseerde oplossingen, zoals gedistribueerde caches en content distributie netwerken (CDN's), komen aan bod. Afhankelijk van de bestudeerde dienst en de gebruikte netwerktechnologieën en -architectuur, worden gecentraliseerde algoritmen voor netwerkontwerp voorgesteld. Deze algoritmen optimaliseren de plaatsing van de servers of netwerkcaches en bepalen de nodige capaciteit van de servers en netwerklinks. De dynamische plaatsing van de aangeboden bestanden in de verschillende netwerkelementen wordt aangepast aan de heersende staat van het netwerk en aan de variërende aanvraagpatronen van de eindgebruikers. Serverselectie, herroutering van aanvragen en het verspreiden van de belasting over het hele netwerk komen hierbij ook aan bod

Development and standardization of an embedded Linux based triple-play IP settop box

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Izmir, 2007Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 46-48)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 57 leavesWith the recent enhancements to the delivery of IP services and of the video codecs such as h.264, transmission of television through IP-based communication systems has been a viable option. An IP settop box (IPSTB) constructs a bridge between a television set and a broadband IP network such as DSL, cable modem, powerline or wireless broadband. IPSTB brings new challenges for the system designers, especially in the areas of inherently organized home networking systems, protocols, and architectures. Future IPSTB products are candidate to converge the information and entertainment technologies. This thesis suggests newly developed device and service discovery methods for the design of an IPSTB software structure that is compatible with the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) audio video (AV) device descriptions. At the design process, it suggests optimized communication schemes between the servers that are in the control of service providers, and the consumer IPSTBs. As a newly developed technology, since there is not any standardization for most parts of the overall IPTV system, this thesis takes proven mechanisms as basis and adapts them to the overall design that consists of the hardware drivers, middleware, and the additional programs which helps the middleware to handle the external components of the system connected via USB or serial interfaces. Being an innovative idea, we have used a control system called Virtual Bus Manager so as to communicate between the aforementioned system components. Some system components such as web browser is based on the X Windows architecture, so cross compiling the X system for the embedded platform has also been a challenge for the feasibility of the final design. Being the second part of the Triple-Play system, Voice over IP application has also been included and based on the compilation of open source software for the corresponding embedded system. Finally, the web browser itself has been based on the popular Gecko web-core that is derived from Firefox

Design and implementation of high quality H.264 video streaming over wireless mesh networks

Wireless multimedia home servers are the next generation of home entertainment systems. From a single broadband connection entering a residence, the multimedia stream is transmitted to television headsets and other peripherals by using only wireless links. The provision of high quality time-critical multimedia services in indoor environment is very challenging due to high attenuation and multi-path fading caused by the walls and contention in the shared channel. In this thesis, we demonstrate that the newly proposed wireless standard on wireless mesh networks can help improve the coverage while supporting Quality of Service requirements of both multimedia and data users, when the video packets are given EDCA priorities based on their importance according to the new high definition video streaming standard H.264. We support our hypothesis by presenting test results gathered from both simulations and from a real implementation test bed, where we observe very low delay and very few packet losses in video stream and almost no loss in perceived video quality even in the presence of high contending neighboring data traffi