The crowd as a cameraman : on-stage display of crowdsourced mobile video at large-scale events

Recording videos with smartphones at large-scale events such as concerts and festivals is very common nowadays. These videos register the atmosphere of the event as it is experienced by the crowd and offer a perspective that is hard to capture by the professional cameras installed throughout the venue. In this article, we present a framework to collect videos from smartphones in the public and blend these into a mosaic that can be readily mixed with professional camera footage and shown on displays during the event. The video upload is prioritized by matching requests of the event director with video metadata, while taking into account the available wireless network capacity. The proposed framework's main novelty is its scalability, supporting the real-time transmission, processing and display of videos recorded by hundreds of simultaneous users in ultra-dense Wi-Fi environments, as well as its proven integration in commercial production environments. The framework has been extensively validated in a controlled lab setting with up to 1 000 clients as well as in a field trial where 1 183 videos were collected from 135 participants recruited from an audience of 8 050 people. 90 % of those videos were uploaded within 6.8 minutes

A Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

The Design of Medium Access Control (MAC) Protocols for Energy Efficient and QoS Provision in Wireless Sensor Networks

This thesis work focuses on innovative design of media access control (MAC) protocols in wireless sensor networks (WNSs). The characteristics of the WSN inquire that the network service design considers both energy efficiency and the associated application requirement. However, most existing protocols address only the issue of energy efficiency. In this thesis, a MAC protocol has been proposed (referred to as Q-MAC) that not only minimized the energy consumption in multi-hop WSNs, but also provides Quality of Service (QoS) by differentiating network services based on priority levels prescribed by different applications. The priority levels reflect the state of system resources including residual energy and queue occupancies. Q-MAC contains both intra- and inter- node arbitration mechanisms. The intra-node packet scheduling employs a multiple queuing architectures, and applies a scheduling scheme consisting of packet classification and weighted arbitration. We introduce the Power Conservation MACAW (PC-MACAW), a power-aware scheduling mechanism which, together with the Loosely Prioritized Random Access (LPRA) algorithm, govern the inter-node scheduling. Performance evaluation are conducted between Q-MAC and S-MAC with respect to two performance metrics: energy consumption and average latency. Simulation results indicate Q-MAC achieves comparable performance to that of S-MAC in non-prioritized traffic scenarios. When packets with different priorities are introduced, Q-MAC yields noticeable average latency differentiations between the classes of service, while preserving the same degree of energy consumption as that of S-MAC. Since the high density nature of WSN may introduce heavy traffic load and thus consume large amount of energy for communication, another MAC protocol, referred to as the Deployment-oriented MAC (D-MAC)has been further proposed. D-MAC minimalizes both sensing and communication redundancy by putting majority of redundant nodes into the sleep state. The idea is to establish a sensing and communication backbone covering the whole sensing field with the least sensing and communication redundancy. In specific, we use equal-size rectangular cells to partition the sensing field and chose the size of each cell in a way such that regardless of the actual location within the cell, a node can always sense the whole cell and communicate with all the nodes in neighboring cells. Once the sensing field has been partitioned using these cells, a localized Location-aware Selection Algorithm (LSA) is carried out to pick up only one node within each cell to be active for a fixed amount of period. This selection is energy-oriented, only nodes with a maximum energy will be on and the rest of nodes will be put into the sleep state once the selection process is over. To balance the energy consumption, the selection algorithm is periodically conducted until all the nodes are out of power. Simulation results indicated that D-MAC saves around 80% energy compared to that of S-MAC and Q-MAC, while maintaining 99% coverage. D-MAC is also superior to S-MAC and Q-MAC in terms of average latency. However, the use of GPS in D-MAC in identifying the nodes within the same cell, would cause extra cost and complexity for the design of sensor nodes

Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks

MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless networks. This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples, however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability. First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical 0. Abstract 3 function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process, to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management, while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data ferries is investigated

Immersive interconnected virtual and augmented reality : a 5G and IoT perspective

Despite remarkable advances, current augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications are a largely individual and local experience. Interconnected AR/VR, where participants can virtually interact across vast distances, remains a distant dream. The great barrier that stands between current technology and such applications is the stringent end-to-end latency requirement, which should not exceed 20 ms in order to avoid motion sickness and other discomforts. Bringing AR/VR to the next level to enable immersive interconnected AR/VR will require significant advances towards 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and a Tactile Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we articulate the technical challenges to enable a future AR/VR end-to-end architecture, that combines 5G URLLC and Tactile IoT technology to support this next generation of interconnected AR/VR applications. Through the use of IoT sensors and actuators, AR/VR applications will be aware of the environmental and user context, supporting human-centric adaptations of the application logic, and lifelike interactions with the virtual environment. We present potential use cases and the required technological building blocks. For each of them, we delve into the current state of the art and challenges that need to be addressed before the dream of remote AR/VR interaction can become reality

Optimization and Communication in UAV Networks

UAVs are becoming a reality and attract increasing attention. They can be remotely controlled or completely autonomous and be used alone or as a fleet and in a large set of applications. They are constrained by hardware since they cannot be too heavy and rely on batteries. Their use still raises a large set of exciting new challenges in terms of trajectory optimization and positioning when they are used alone or in cooperation, and communication when they evolve in swarm, to name but a few examples. This book presents some new original contributions regarding UAV or UAV swarm optimization and communication aspects