Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

Optimized resource distribution for interactive TV applications

This paper proposes a novel resource optimization scheme for cloud-based interactive television applications that are increasingly believed to be the future of television broadcasting and media consumption, in general. The varying distribution of groups of users and the need for on-the-fly media processing inherent to this type of application necessitates a mechanism to efficiently allocate the resources at both a content and network level. A heuristic solution is proposed in order to (a) generate end-to-end delay bound multicast trees for individual groups of users and (b) co-locate multiple multicast trees, such that a minimum group quality metric can be satisfied. The performance of the proposed heuristic solution is evaluated in terms of the serving probability (i.e., the resource utilization efficiency) and execution time of the resource allocation decision making process. It is shown that improvements in the serving probability of up to 50%, in comparison with existing resource allocation schemes, and several orders of magnitude reduction of the execution time, in comparison to the linear programming approach to solving the optimization problem, can be achieved

NETEMBED: A Network Resource Mapping Service for Distributed Applications

Emerging configurable infrastructures such as large-scale overlays and grids, distributed testbeds, and sensor networks comprise diverse sets of available computing resources (e.g., CPU and OS capabilities and memory constraints) and network conditions (e.g., link delay, bandwidth, loss rate, and jitter) whose characteristics are both complex and time-varying. At the same time, distributed applications to be deployed on these infrastructures exhibit increasingly complex constraints and requirements on resources they wish to utilize. Examples include selecting nodes and links to schedule an overlay multicast file transfer across the Grid, or embedding a network experiment with specific resource constraints in a distributed testbed such as PlanetLab. Thus, a common problem facing the efficient deployment of distributed applications on these infrastructures is that of "mapping" application-level requirements onto the network in such a manner that the requirements of the application are realized, assuming that the underlying characteristics of the network are known. We refer to this problem as the network embedding problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach to tackle this combinatorially-hard problem. Thanks to a number of heuristics, our approach greatly improves performance and scalability over previously existing techniques. It does so by pruning large portions of the search space without overlooking any valid embedding. We present a construction that allows a compact representation of candidate embeddings, which is maintained by carefully controlling the order via which candidate mappings are inserted and invalid mappings are removed. We present an implementation of our proposed technique, which we call NETEMBED – a service that identify feasible mappings of a virtual network configuration (the query network) to an existing real infrastructure or testbed (the hosting network). We present results of extensive performance evaluation experiments of NETEMBED using several combinations of real and synthetic network topologies. Our results show that our NETEMBED service is quite effective in identifying one (or all) possible embeddings for quite sizable queries and hosting networks – much larger than what any of the existing techniques or services are able to handle.National Science Foundation (CNS Cybertrust 0524477, NSF CNS NeTS 0520166, NSF CNS ITR 0205294, EIA RI 0202067

Advanced Free Viewpoint Video Streaming Techniques

Free-viewpoint video is a new type of interactive multimedia service allowing users to control their viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any perspective. The uniquely generated and displayed views are composed from two or more high bitrate camera streams that must be delivered to the users depending on their continuously changing perspective. Due to significant network and computational resource requirements, we proposed scalable viewpoint generation and delivery schemes based on multicast forwarding and distributed approach. Our aim was to find the optimal deployment locations of the distributed viewpoint synthesis processes in the network topology by allowing network nodes to act as proxy servers with caching and viewpoint synthesis functionalities. Moreover, a predictive multicast group management scheme was introduced in order to provide all camera views that may be requested in the near future and prevent the viewpoint synthesizer algorithm from remaining without camera streams. The obtained results showed that even 42% traffic decrease can be realized using distributed viewpoint synthesis and the probability of viewpoint synthesis starvation can be also significantly reduced in future free viewpoint video services

Learning algorithms for the control of routing in integrated service communication networks

There is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the nature of traffic on future integrated service networks. This uncertainty motivates the use of adaptive resource allocation policies that can take advantage of the statistical fluctuations in the traffic demands. The adaptive control mechanisms must be 'lightweight', in terms of their overheads, and scale to potentially large networks with many traffic flows. Adaptive routing is one form of adaptive resource allocation, and this thesis considers the application of Stochastic Learning Automata (SLA) for distributed, lightweight adaptive routing in future integrated service communication networks. The thesis begins with a broad critical review of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques applied to the control of communication networks. Detailed simulation models of integrated service networks are then constructed, and learning automata based routing is compared with traditional techniques on large scale networks. Learning automata are examined for the 'Quality-of-Service' (QoS) routing problem in realistic network topologies, where flows may be routed in the network subject to multiple QoS metrics, such as bandwidth and delay. It is found that learning automata based routing gives considerable blocking probability improvements over shortest path routing, despite only using local connectivity information and a simple probabilistic updating strategy. Furthermore, automata are considered for routing in more complex environments spanning issues such as multi-rate traffic, trunk reservation, routing over multiple domains, routing in high bandwidth-delay product networks and the use of learning automata as a background learning process. Automata are also examined for routing of both 'real-time' and 'non-real-time' traffics in an integrated traffic environment, where the non-real-time traffic has access to the bandwidth 'left over' by the real-time traffic. It is found that adopting learning automata for the routing of the real-time traffic may improve the performance to both real and non-real-time traffics under certain conditions. In addition, it is found that one set of learning automata may route both traffic types satisfactorily. Automata are considered for the routing of multicast connections in receiver-oriented, dynamic environments, where receivers may join and leave the multicast sessions dynamically. Automata are shown to be able to minimise the average delay or the total cost of the resulting trees using the appropriate feedback from the environment. Automata provide a distributed solution to the dynamic multicast problem, requiring purely local connectivity information and a simple updating strategy. Finally, automata are considered for the routing of multicast connections that require QoS guarantees, again in receiver-oriented dynamic environments. It is found that the distributed application of learning automata leads to considerably lower blocking probabilities than a shortest path tree approach, due to a combination of load balancing and minimum cost behaviour

Bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization and its application to multicast routing problem in communication networks

This paper proposes a novel bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization (BVDPSO) approach and extends its application to the NP-complete multicast routing problem (MRP). The main contribution is the extension of PSO from continuous domain to the binary or discrete domain. Firstly, a novel bi-velocity strategy is developed to represent possibilities of each dimension being 1 and 0. This strategy is suitable to describe the binary characteristic of the MRP where 1 stands for a node being selected to construct the multicast tree while 0 stands for being otherwise. Secondly, BVDPSO updates the velocity and position according to the learning mechanism of the original PSO in continuous domain. This maintains the fast convergence speed and global search ability of the original PSO. Experiments are comprehensively conducted on all of the 58 instances with small, medium, and large scales in the OR-library (Operation Research Library). The results confirm that BVDPSO can obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions rapidly as it only needs to generate a few multicast trees. BVDPSO outperforms not only several state-of-the-art and recent heuristic algorithms for the MRP problems, but also algorithms based on GA, ACO, and PSO