2,493 research outputs found
Improving BitTorrent's Peer Selection For Multimedia Content On-Demand Delivery
The great efficiency achieved by the BitTorrent protocol for the distribution
of large amounts of data inspired its adoption to provide multimedia content
on-demand delivery over the Internet. As it is not designed for this purpose,
some adjustments have been proposed in order to meet the related QoS
requirements like low startup delay and smooth playback continuity.
Accordingly, this paper introduces a BitTorrent-like proposal named as
Quota-Based Peer Selection (QBPS). This proposal is mainly based on the
adaptation of the original peer-selection policy of the BitTorrent protocol.
Its validation is achieved by means of simulations and competitive analysis.
The final results show that QBPS outperforms other recent proposals of the
literature. For instance, it achieves a throughput optimization of up to 48.0%
in low-provision capacity scenarios where users are very interactive.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications(IJCNC)
Vol.7, No.6, November 201
Cooperative Caching for Multimedia Streaming in Overlay Networks
Traditional data caching, such as web caching, only focuses on how to boost the hit rate of requested objects in caches, and therefore, how to reduce the initial delay for object retrieval. However, for multimedia objects, not only reducing the delay of object retrieval, but also provisioning reasonably stable network bandwidth to clients, while the fetching of the cached objects goes on, is important as well. In this paper, we propose our cooperative caching scheme for a multimedia delivery scenario, supporting a large number of peers over peer-to-peer overlay networks. In order to facilitate multimedia streaming and downloading service from servers, our caching scheme (1) determines the appropriate availability of cached stream segments in a cache community, (2) determines the appropriate peer for cache replacement, and (3) performs bandwidth-aware and availability-aware cache replacement. By doing so, it achieves (1) small delay of stream retrieval, (2) stable bandwidth provisioning during retrieval session, and (3) load balancing of clients' requests among peers
Extended Equal Service and Differentiated Service Models for Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have proved to be the most effective and popular
file sharing applications in recent years. Previous studies mainly focus on the
equal service and the differentiated service strategies when peers have no
initial data before their download. In an upload-constrained P2P file sharing
system, we model both the equal service process and the differentiated service
process when peers' initial data distribution satisfies some special
conditions, and also show how to minimize the time to get the file to any
number of peers. The proposed models can reveal the intrinsic relations among
the initial data amount, the size of peer set and the minimum last finish time.
By using the models, we can also provide arbitrary degree of differentiated
service to a certain number of peers. We believe that our analysis process and
achieved theoretical results could provide fundamental insights into studies on
bandwidth allocation and data scheduling, and can give helpful reference both
for improving system performance and building effective incentive mechanism in
P2P file sharing systems
Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless
communications is stressing the need for the development of
mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services
adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being
aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and
intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless
technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation,
since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is
required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware
architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service
development. The architecture hides technology-specific
mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness
and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most
widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses
motivations and design details in the challenging context of
mobile multimedia streaming applications
Scalable download protocols
Scalable on-demand content delivery systems, designed to effectively handle increasing request rates, typically use service aggregation or content replication techniques. Service aggregation relies on one-to-many communication techniques, such as multicast, to efficiently deliver content from a single sender to multiple receivers. With replication, multiple geographically distributed replicas of the service or content share the load of processing client requests and enable delivery from a nearby server.Previous scalable protocols for downloading large, popular files from a single server include batching and cyclic multicast. Analytic lower bounds developed in this thesis show that neither of these protocols consistently yields performance close to optimal. New hybrid protocols are proposed that achieve within 20% of the optimal delay in homogeneous systems, as well as within 25% of the optimal maximum client delay in all heterogeneous scenarios considered.In systems utilizing both service aggregation and replication, well-designed policies determining which replica serves each request must balance the objectives of achieving high locality of service, and high efficiency of service aggregation. By comparing classes of policies, using both analysis and simulations, this thesis shows that there are significant performance advantages in using current system state information (rather than only proximities and average loads) and in deferring selection decisions when possible. Most of these performance gains can be achieved using only “local” (rather than global) request information.Finally, this thesis proposes adaptations of already proposed peer-assisted download techniques to support a streaming (rather than download) service, enabling playback to begin well before the entire media file is received. These protocols split each file into pieces, which can be downloaded from multiple sources, including other clients downloading the same file. Using simulations, a candidate protocol is presented and evaluated. The protocol includes both a piece selection technique that effectively mediates the conflict between achieving high piece diversity and the in-order requirements of media file playback, as well as a simple on-line rule for deciding when playback can safely commence
Self-Organizing Flows in Social Networks
Social networks offer users new means of accessing information, essentially
relying on "social filtering", i.e. propagation and filtering of information by
social contacts. The sheer amount of data flowing in these networks, combined
with the limited budget of attention of each user, makes it difficult to ensure
that social filtering brings relevant content to the interested users. Our
motivation in this paper is to measure to what extent self-organization of the
social network results in efficient social filtering. To this end we introduce
flow games, a simple abstraction that models network formation under selfish
user dynamics, featuring user-specific interests and budget of attention. In
the context of homogeneous user interests, we show that selfish dynamics
converge to a stable network structure (namely a pure Nash equilibrium) with
close-to-optimal information dissemination. We show in contrast, for the more
realistic case of heterogeneous interests, that convergence, if it occurs, may
lead to information dissemination that can be arbitrarily inefficient, as
captured by an unbounded "price of anarchy". Nevertheless the situation differs
when users' interests exhibit a particular structure, captured by a metric
space with low doubling dimension. In that case, natural autonomous dynamics
converge to a stable configuration. Moreover, users obtain all the information
of interest to them in the corresponding dissemination, provided their budget
of attention is logarithmic in the size of their interest set
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