549 research outputs found
vSkyConf: Cloud-assisted Multi-party Mobile Video Conferencing
As an important application in the busy world today, mobile video
conferencing facilitates virtual face-to-face communication with friends,
families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to
provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile
devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack
of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to
large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a
cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the
quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly
employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we
allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their
surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams
among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and
buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A
fully decentralized, optimal algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of
streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths,
such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the
highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a
buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with optimal stream
distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the
excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast
solutions.Comment: 10 page
AngelCast: cloud-based peer-assisted live streaming using optimized multi-tree construction
Increasingly, commercial content providers (CPs) offer streaming solutions using peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, which promises significant scalabil- ity by leveraging clientsâ upstream capacity. A major limitation of P2P live streaming is that playout rates are constrained by clientsâ upstream capac- ities â typically much lower than downstream capacities â which limit the quality of the delivered stream. To leverage P2P architectures without sacri- ficing quality, CPs must commit additional resources to complement clientsâ resources. In this work, we propose a cloud-based service AngelCast that enables CPs to complement P2P streaming. By subscribing to AngelCast, a CP is able to deploy extra resources (angel), on-demand from the cloud, to maintain a desirable stream quality. Angels do not download the whole stream, nor are they in possession of it. Rather, angels only relay the minimal fraction of the stream necessary to achieve the desired quality. We provide a lower bound on the minimum angel capacity needed to maintain a desired client bit-rate, and develop a fluid model construction to achieve it. Realizing the limitations of the fluid model construction, we design a practical multi- tree construction that captures the spirit of the optimal construction, and avoids its limitations. We present a prototype implementation of AngelCast, along with experimental results confirming the feasibility of our service.Supported in part by NSF awards #0720604, #0735974, #0820138, #0952145, #1012798 #1012798 #1430145 #1414119. (0720604 - NSF; 0735974 - NSF; 0820138 - NSF; 0952145 - NSF; 1012798 - NSF; 1430145 - NSF; 1414119 - NSF
Peer-to-peer stream merging for stored multimedia
In recent years, with the fast development of resource capability of both the Internet and personal computers, multimedia applications like video-on-demand (VOD) streaming have gained dramatic growth and been shown to be potential killer applications in the current and next-generation Internet. Scalable deployment of these applications has become a hot problem area due to the potentially high server and network bandwidth required in these systems.The conventional approach in a VOD streaming system dedicates a media stream for each client request, which is not scalable in a wide-area delivery system serving potentially very large numbers of clients. Recently, various efficient delivery techniques have been proposed to improve the scalability of VOD delivery systems. One approach is to use a scalable delivery protocol based on multicast, such as periodic broadcast or stream merging. These protocols have been mostly developed for single-server based systems and attempt to have each media stream serve as many clients as possible, so as to minimize the required server and network bandwidth. However, the performance improvements possible with techniques that deliver all streams from a single server are limited, especially regarding the required network bandwidth. Another approach is based on proxy caching and content replication, such as in content delivery networks (CDN). Although this approach is able to effectively distribute load across multiple CDN servers, the cost of this approach may be high.With the focus on further improving the system efficiency regarding the server and network bandwidth requirement, a new scalable streaming protocol is developed in this work. It adapts a previously proposed technique called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) to use a peer-to-peer delivery approach. To be more efficient in media delivery, the conventional early merging policy associated with HMSM is extended to be compatible with the peer-to-peer environment, and various peer selection policies are designed for initiation of media streams. The impact of limited peer resource capability is also studied in this work. In the performance study, a number of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new protocol and various design policies, and promising results are reported
Network coding meets multimedia: a review
While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin
DecVi: Adaptive Video Conferencing on Open Peer-to-Peer Networks
Video conferencing has become the preferred way of interacting virtually.
Current video conferencing applications, like Zoom, Teams or WebEx, are
centralized, cloud-based platforms whose performance crucially depends on the
proximity of clients to their data centers. Clients from low-income countries
are particularly affected as most data centers from major cloud providers are
located in economically advanced nations. Centralized conferencing applications
also suffer from occasional outages and are embattled by serious privacy
violation allegations. In recent years, decentralized video conferencing
applications built over p2p networks and incentivized through blockchain are
becoming popular. A key characteristic of these networks is their openness:
anyone can host a media server on the network and gain reward for providing
service. Strong economic incentives combined with lower entry barrier to join
the network, makes increasing server coverage to even remote regions of the
world. These reasons, however, also lead to a security problem: a server may
obfuscate its true location in order to gain an unfair business advantage. In
this paper, we consider the problem of multicast tree construction for video
conferencing sessions in open p2p conferencing applications. We propose DecVi,
a decentralized multicast tree construction protocol that adaptively discovers
efficient tree structures based on an exploration-exploitation framework. DecVi
is motivated by the combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem and uses a
succinct learning model to compute effective actions. Despite operating in a
multi-agent setting with each server having only limited knowledge of the
global network and without cooperation among servers, experimentally we show
DecVi achieves similar quality-of-experience compared to a centralized globally
optimal algorithm while achieving higher reliability and flexibility
Peer-to-peer interactive 3D media dissemination in networked virtual environments
Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH
Recommended from our members
Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term âNetworked Mediaâ implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizensâ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications âon the moveâ, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
View-Upload Decoupling: A Redesign of Multi-Channel P2P Video Systems
AbstractâIn current multi-channel live P2P video systems, there are several fundamental performance problems including exceedingly-large channel switching delays, long playback lags, and poor performance for less popular channels. These performance problems primarily stem from two intrinsic characteristics of multi-channel P2P video systems: channel churn and channelresource imbalance. In this paper, we propose a radically different cross-channel P2P streaming framework, called View-Upload Decoupling (VUD). VUD strictly decouples peer downloading from uploading, bringing stability to multichannel systems and enabling cross-channel resource sharing. We propose a set of peer assignment and bandwidth allocation algorithms to properly provision bandwidth among channels, and introduce substream swarming to reduce the bandwidth overhead. We evaluate the performance of VUD via extensive simulations as well with a PlanetLab implementation. Our simulation and PlanetLab results show that VUD is resilient to channel churn, and achieves lower switching delay and better streaming quality. In particular, the streaming quality of small channels is greatly improved. I
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