Exposing a waveform interface to the wireless channel for scalable video broadcast

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-167).Video broadcast and mobile video challenge the conventional wireless design. In broadcast and mobile scenarios the bit-rate supported by the channel differs across receivers and varies quickly over time. The conventional design however forces the source to pick a single bit-rate and degrades sharply when the channel cannot support it. This thesis presents SoftCast, a clean-slate design for wireless video where the source transmits one video stream that each receiver decodes to a video quality commensurate with its specific instantaneous channel quality. To do so, SoftCast ensures the samples of the digital video signal transmitted on the channel are linearly related to the pixels' luminance. Thus, when channel noise perturbs the transmitted signal samples, the perturbation naturally translates into approximation in the original video pixels. Hence, a receiver with a good channel (low noise) obtains a high fidelity video, and a receiver with a bad channel (high noise) obtains a low fidelity video. SoftCast's linear design in essence resembles the traditional analog approach to communication, which was abandoned in most major communication systems, as it does not enjoy the theoretical opimality of the digital separate design in point-topoint channels nor its effectiveness at compressing the source data. In this thesis, I show that in combination with decorrelating transforms common to modern digital video compression, the analog approach can achieve performance competitive with the prevalent digital design for a wide variety of practical point-to-point scenarios, and outperforms it in the broadcast and mobile scenarios. Since the conventional bit-pipe interface of the wireless physical layer (PHY) forces the separation of source and channel coding, to realize SoftCast, architectural changes to the wireless PHY are necessary. This thesis discusses the design of RawPHY, a reorganization of the PHY which exposes a waveform interface to the channel while shielding the designers of the higher layers from much of the perplexity of the wireless channel. I implement SoftCast and RawPHY using the GNURadio software and the USRP platform. Results from a 20-node testbed show that SoftCast improves the average video quality (i.e., PSNR) across diverse broadcast receivers in our testbed by up to 5.5 dB in comparison to conventional single- or multi-layer video. Even for a single receiver, it eliminates video glitches caused by mobility and increases robustness to packet loss by an order of magnitude.by Szymon Kazimierz Jakubczak.Ph.D

Models and Methods for Network Selection and Balancing in Heterogeneous Scenarios

The outbreak of 5G technologies for wireless communications can be considered a response to the need for widespread coverage, in terms of connectivity and bandwidth, to guarantee broadband services, such as streaming or on-demand programs offered by the main television networks or new generation services based on augmented and virtual reality (AR / VR). The purpose of the study conducted for this thesis aims to solve two of the main problems that will occur with the outbreak of 5G, that is, the search for the best possible connectivity, in order to offer users the resources necessary to take advantage of the new generation services, and multicast as required by the eMBMS. The aim of the thesis is the search for innovative algorithms that will allow to obtain the best connectivity to offer users the resources necessary to use the 5G services in a heterogeneous scenario. Study UF that allows you to improve the search for the best candidate network and to achieve a balance that allows you to avoid congestion of the chosen networks. To achieve these two important focuses, I conducted a study on the main mathematical methods that made it possible to select the network based on QoS parameters based on the type of traffic made by users. A further goal was to improve the computational computation performance they present. Furthermore, I carried out a study in order to obtain an innovative algorithm that would allow the management of multicast. The algorithm that has been implemented responds to the needs present in the eMBMS, in realistic scenarios

Enhanced Multimedia Exchanges over the Internet

Although the Internet was not originally designed for exchanging multimedia streams, consumers heavily depend on it for audiovisual data delivery. The intermittent nature of multimedia traffic, the unguaranteed underlying communication infrastructure, and dynamic user behavior collectively result in the degradation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE) perceived by end-users. Consequently, the volume of signalling messages is inevitably increased to compensate for the degradation of the desired service qualities. Improved multimedia services could leverage adaptive streaming as well as blockchain-based solutions to enhance media-rich experiences over the Internet at the cost of increased signalling volume. Many recent studies in the literature provide signalling reduction and blockchain-based methods for authenticated media access over the Internet while utilizing resources quasi-efficiently. To further increase the efficiency of multimedia communications, novel signalling overhead and content access latency reduction solutions are investigated in this dissertation including: (1) the first two research topics utilize steganography to reduce signalling bandwidth utilization while increasing the capacity of the multimedia network; and (2) the third research topic utilizes multimedia content access request management schemes to guarantee throughput values for servicing users, end-devices, and the network. Signalling of multimedia streaming is generated at every layer of the communication protocol stack; At the highest layer, segment requests are generated, and at the lower layers, byte tracking messages are exchanged. Through leveraging steganography, essential signalling information is encoded within multimedia payloads to reduce the amount of resources consumed by non-payload data. The first steganographic solution hides signalling messages within multimedia payloads, thereby freeing intermediate node buffers from queuing non-payload packets. Consequently, source nodes are capable of delivering control information to receiving nodes at no additional network overhead. A utility function is designed to minimize the volume of overhead exchanged while minimizing visual artifacts. Therefore, the proposed scheme is designed to leverage the fidelity of the multimedia stream to reduce the largest amount of control overhead with the lowest negative visual impact. The second steganographic solution enables protocol translation through embedding packet header information within payload data to alternatively utilize lightweight headers. The protocol translator leverages a proposed utility function to enable the maximum number of translations while maintaining QoS and QoE requirements in terms of packet throughput and playback bit-rate. As the number of multimedia users and sources increases, decentralized content access and management over a blockchain-based system is inevitable. Blockchain technologies suffer from large processing latencies; consequently reducing the throughput of a multimedia network. Reducing blockchain-based access latencies is therefore essential to maintaining a decentralized scalable model with seamless functionality and efficient utilization of resources. Adapting blockchains to feeless applications will then port the utility of ledger-based networks to audiovisual applications in a faultless manner. The proposed transaction processing scheme will enable ledger maintainers in sustaining desired throughputs necessary for delivering expected QoS and QoE values for decentralized audiovisual platforms. A block slicing algorithm is designed to ensure that the ledger maintenance strategy is benefiting the operations of the blockchain-based multimedia network. Using the proposed algorithm, the throughput and latency of operations within the multimedia network are then maintained at a desired level

Protocole de routage à chemins multiples pour des réseaux ad hoc

Ad hoc networks consist of a collection of wireless mobile nodes which dynamically exchange data without reliance on any fixed based station or a wired backbone network. They are by definition self-organized. The frequent topological changes make multi-hops routing a crucial issue for these networks. In this PhD thesis, we propose a multipath routing protocol named Multipath Optimized Link State Routing (MP-OLSR). It is a multipath extension of OLSR, and can be regarded as a hybrid routing scheme because it combines the proactive nature of topology sensing and reactive nature of multipath computation. The auxiliary functions as route recovery and loop detection are introduced to improve the performance of the network. The usage of queue length metric for link quality criteria is studied and the compatibility between single path and multipath routing is discussed to facilitate the deployment of the protocol. The simulations based on NS2 and Qualnet softwares are performed in different scenarios. A testbed is also set up in the campus of Polytech’Nantes. The results from the simulator and testbed reveal that MP-OLSR is particularly suitable for mobile, large and dense networks with heavy network load thanks to its ability to distribute the traffic into different paths and effective auxiliary functions. The H.264/SVC video service is applied to ad hoc networks with MP-OLSR. By exploiting the scalable characteristic of H.264/SVC, we propose to use Priority Forward Error Correction coding based on Finite Radon Transform (FRT) to improve the received video quality. An evaluation framework called SVCEval is built to simulate the SVC video transmission over different kinds of networks in Qualnet. This second study highlights the interest of multiple path routing to improve quality of experience over self-organized networks.Les réseaux ad hoc sont constitués d’un ensemble de nœuds mobiles qui échangent des données sans infrastructure de type point d’accès ou artère filaire. Ils sont par définition auto-organisés. Les changements fréquents de topologie des réseaux ad hoc rendent le routage multi-sauts très problématique. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons un protocole de routage à chemins multiples appelé Multipath Optimized Link State Routing (MP-OLSR). C’est une extension d’OLSR à chemins multiples qui peut être considérée comme une méthode de routage hybride. En effet, MP-OLSR combine la caractéristique proactive de la détection de topologie et la caractéristique réactive du calcul de chemins multiples qui est effectué à la demande. Les fonctions auxiliaires comme la récupération de routes ou la détection de boucles sont introduites pour améliorer la performance du réseau. L’utilisation de la longueur des files d’attente des nœuds intermédiaires comme critère de qualité de lien est étudiée et la compatibilité entre routage à chemins multiples et chemin unique est discutée pour faciliter le déploiement du protocole. Les simulations basées sur les logiciels NS2 et Qualnet sont effectuées pour tester le routage MP-OLSR dans des scénarios variés. Une mise en œuvre a également été réalisée au cours de cette thèse avec une expérimentation sur le campus de Polytech’Nantes. Les résultats de la simulation et de l’expérimentation révèlent que MP-OLSR est particulièrement adapté pour les réseaux mobiles et denses avec des trafics élevés grâce à sa capacité à distribuer le trafic dans des chemins différents et à des fonctions auxiliaires efficaces. Au niveau application, le service vidéo H.264/SVC est appliqué à des réseaux ad hoc MP-OLSR. En exploitant la hiérarchie naturelle délivrée par le format H.264/SVC, nous proposons d’utiliser un codage à protection inégale (PFEC) basé sur la Transformation de Radon Finie (FRT) pour améliorer la qualité de la vidéo à la réception. Un outil appelé SVCEval est développé pour simuler la transmission de vidéo SVC sur différents types de réseaux dans le logiciel Qualnet. Cette deuxième étude témoigne de l’intérêt du codage à protection inégale dans un routage à chemins multiples pour améliorer une qualité d’usage sur des réseaux auto-organisés

Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges

Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies

Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled