162 research outputs found
Towards Hybrid Cloud-assisted Crowdsourced Live Streaming: Measurement and Analysis
Crowdsourced Live Streaming (CLS), most notably Twitch.tv, has seen explosive
growth in its popularity in the past few years. In such systems, any user can
lively broadcast video content of interest to others, e.g., from a game player
to many online viewers. To fulfill the demands from both massive and
heterogeneous broadcasters and viewers, expensive server clusters have been
deployed to provide video ingesting and transcoding services. Despite the
existence of highly popular channels, a significant portion of the channels is
indeed unpopular. Yet as our measurement shows, these broadcasters are
consuming considerable system resources; in particular, 25% (resp. 30%) of
bandwidth (resp. computation) resources are used by the broadcasters who do not
have any viewers at all. In this paper, we closely examine the challenge of
handling unpopular live-broadcasting channels in CLS systems and present a
comprehensive solution for service partitioning on hybrid cloud. The
trace-driven evaluation shows that our hybrid cloud-assisted design can smartly
assign ingesting and transcoding tasks to the elastic cloud virtual machines,
providing flexible system deployment cost-effectively
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On Optimal and Fair Service Allocation in Mobile Cloud Computing
This paper studies the optimal and fair service allocation for a variety of
mobile applications (single or group and collaborative mobile applications) in
mobile cloud computing. We exploit the observation that using tiered clouds,
i.e. clouds at multiple levels (local and public) can increase the performance
and scalability of mobile applications. We proposed a novel framework to model
mobile applications as a location-time workflows (LTW) of tasks; here users
mobility patterns are translated to mobile service usage patterns. We show that
an optimal mapping of LTWs to tiered cloud resources considering multiple QoS
goals such application delay, device power consumption and user cost/price is
an NP-hard problem for both single and group-based applications. We propose an
efficient heuristic algorithm called MuSIC that is able to perform well (73% of
optimal, 30% better than simple strategies), and scale well to a large number
of users while ensuring high mobile application QoS. We evaluate MuSIC and the
2-tier mobile cloud approach via implementation (on real world clouds) and
extensive simulations using rich mobile applications like intensive signal
processing, video streaming and multimedia file sharing applications. Our
experimental and simulation results indicate that MuSIC supports scalable
operation (100+ concurrent users executing complex workflows) while improving
QoS. We observe about 25% lower delays and power (under fixed price
constraints) and about 35% decrease in price (considering fixed delay) in
comparison to only using the public cloud. Our studies also show that MuSIC
performs quite well under different mobility patterns, e.g. random waypoint and
Manhattan models
Hit Ratio Driven Mobile Edge Caching Scheme for Video on Demand Services
More and more scholars focus on mobile edge computing (MEC) technology,
because the strong storage and computing capabilities of MEC servers can reduce
the long transmission delay, bandwidth waste, energy consumption, and privacy
leaks in the data transmission process. In this paper, we study the cache
placement problem to determine how to cache videos and which videos to be
cached in a mobile edge computing system. First, we derive the video request
probability by taking into account video popularity, user preference and the
characteristic of video representations. Second, based on the acquired request
probability, we formulate a cache placement problem with the objective to
maximize the cache hit ratio subject to the storage capacity constraints.
Finally, in order to solve the formulated problem, we transform it into a
grouping knapsack problem and develop a dynamic programming algorithm to obtain
the optimal caching strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed
algorithm can greatly improve the cache hit ratio
Hidden and Uncontrolled - On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats
Network steganography is the art of hiding secret information within innocent
network transmissions. Recent findings indicate that novel malware is
increasingly using network steganography. Similarly, other malicious activities
can profit from network steganography, such as data leakage or the exchange of
pedophile data. This paper provides an introduction to network steganography
and highlights its potential application for harmful purposes. We discuss the
issues related to countering network steganography in practice and provide an
outlook on further research directions and problems.Comment: 11 page
Crowdsourced Live Streaming over the Cloud
Empowered by today's rich tools for media generation and distribution, and
the convenient Internet access, crowdsourced streaming generalizes the
single-source streaming paradigm by including massive contributors for a video
channel. It calls a joint optimization along the path from crowdsourcers,
through streaming servers, to the end-users to minimize the overall latency.
The dynamics of the video sources, together with the globalized request demands
and the high computation demand from each sourcer, make crowdsourced live
streaming challenging even with powerful support from modern cloud computing.
In this paper, we present a generic framework that facilitates a cost-effective
cloud service for crowdsourced live streaming. Through adaptively leasing, the
cloud servers can be provisioned in a fine granularity to accommodate
geo-distributed video crowdsourcers. We present an optimal solution to deal
with service migration among cloud instances of diverse lease prices. It also
addresses the location impact to the streaming quality. To understand the
performance of the proposed strategies in the realworld, we have built a
prototype system running over the planetlab and the Amazon/Microsoft Cloud. Our
extensive experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness of our solution in
terms of deployment cost and streaming quality
Cooperative Multi-Bitrate Video Caching and Transcoding in Multicarrier NOMA-Assisted Heterogeneous Virtualized MEC Networks
Cooperative video caching and transcoding in mobile edge computing (MEC)
networks is a new paradigm for future wireless networks, e.g., 5G and 5G
beyond, to reduce scarce and expensive backhaul resource usage by prefetching
video files within radio access networks (RANs). Integration of this technique
with other advent technologies, such as wireless network virtualization and
multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA), provides more flexible
video delivery opportunities, which leads to enhancements both for the
network's revenue and for the end-users' service experience. In this regard, we
propose a two-phase RAF for a parallel cooperative joint multi-bitrate video
caching and transcoding in heterogeneous virtualized MEC networks. In the cache
placement phase, we propose novel proactive delivery-aware cache placement
strategies (DACPSs) by jointly allocating physical and radio resources based on
network stochastic information to exploit flexible delivery opportunities.
Then, for the delivery phase, we propose a delivery policy based on the user
requests and network channel conditions. The optimization problems
corresponding to both phases aim to maximize the total revenue of network
slices, i.e., virtual networks. Both problems are non-convex and suffer from
high-computational complexities. For each phase, we show how the problem can be
solved efficiently. We also propose a low-complexity RAF in which the
complexity of the delivery algorithm is significantly reduced. A Delivery-aware
cache refreshment strategy (DACRS) in the delivery phase is also proposed to
tackle the dynamically changes of network stochastic information. Extensive
numerical assessments demonstrate a performance improvement of up to 30% for
our proposed DACPSs and DACRS over traditional approaches.Comment: 53 pages, 24 figure
In-Network View Synthesis for Interactive Multiview Video Systems
To enable Interactive multiview video systems with a minimum view-switching
delay, multiple camera views are sent to the users, which are used as reference
images to synthesize additional virtual views via depth-image-based rendering.
In practice, bandwidth constraints may however restrict the number of reference
views sent to clients per time unit, which may in turn limit the quality of the
synthesized viewpoints. We argue that the reference view selection should
ideally be performed close to the users, and we study the problem of in-network
reference view synthesis such that the navigation quality is maximized at the
clients. We consider a distributed cloud network architecture where data stored
in a main cloud is delivered to end users with the help of cloudlets, i.e.,
resource-rich proxies close to the users. In order to satisfy last-hop
bandwidth constraints from the cloudlet to the users, a cloudlet re-samples
viewpoints of the 3D scene into a discrete set of views (combination of
received camera views and virtual views synthesized) to be used as reference
for the synthesis of additional virtual views at the client. This in-network
synthesis leads to better viewpoint sampling given a bandwidth constraint
compared to simple selection of camera views, but it may however carry a
distortion penalty in the cloudlet-synthesized reference views. We therefore
cast a new reference view selection problem where the best subset of views is
defined as the one minimizing the distortion over a view navigation window
defined by the user under some transmission bandwidth constraints. We show that
the view selection problem is NP-hard, and propose an effective polynomial time
algorithm using dynamic programming to solve the optimization problem.
Simulation results finally confirm the performance gain offered by virtual view
synthesis in the network
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