Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” 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 citizens’ 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 “on the move”, 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

Scalable and network aware video coding for advanced communications over heterogeneous networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis work addresses the issues concerned with the provision of scalable video services over heterogeneous networks particularly with regards to dynamic adaptation and user’s acceptable quality of service. In order to provide and sustain an adaptive and network friendly multimedia communication service, a suite of techniques that achieved automatic scalability and adaptation are developed. These techniques are evaluated objectively and subjectively to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) provided to diverse users with variable constraints and dynamic resources. The research ensured the consideration of various levels of user acceptable QoS The techniques are further evaluated with view to establish their performance against state of the art scalable and non-scalable techniques. To further improve the adaptability of the designed techniques, several experiments and real time simulations are conducted with the aim of determining the optimum performance with various coding parameters and scenarios. The coding parameters and scenarios are evaluated and analyzed to determine their performance using various types of video content and formats. Several algorithms are developed to provide a dynamic adaptation of coding tools and parameters to specific video content type, format and bandwidth of transmission. Due to the nature of heterogeneous networks where channel conditions, terminals, users capabilities and preferences etc are unpredictably changing, hence limiting the adaptability of a specific technique adopted, a Dynamic Scalability Decision Making Algorithm (SADMA) is developed. The algorithm autonomously selects one of the designed scalability techniques basing its decision on the monitored and reported channel conditions. Experiments were conducted using a purpose-built heterogeneous network simulator and the network-aware selection of the scalability techniques is based on real time simulation results. A technique with a minimum delay, low bit-rate, low frame rate and low quality is adopted as a reactive measure to a predicted bad channel condition. If the use of the techniques is not favoured due to deteriorating channel conditions reported, a reduced layered stream or base layer is used. If the network status does not allow the use of the base layer, then the stream uses parameter identifiers with high efficiency to improve the scalability and adaptation of the video service. To further improve the flexibility and efficiency of the algorithm, a dynamic de-blocking filter and lambda value selection are analyzed and introduced in the algorithm. Various methods, interfaces and algorithms are defined for transcoding from one technique to another and extracting sub-streams when the network conditions do not allow for the transmission of the entire bit-stream

Facilitating Internet of Things on the Edge

The evolution of electronics and wireless technologies has entered a new era, the Internet of Things (IoT). Presently, IoT technologies influence the global market, bringing benefits in many areas, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and entertainment. Modern IoT devices serve as a thin client with data processing performed in a remote computing node, such as a cloud server or a mobile edge compute unit. These computing units own significant resources that allow prompt data processing. The user experience for such an approach relies drastically on the availability and quality of the internet connection. In this case, if the internet connection is unavailable, the resulting operations of IoT applications can be completely disrupted. It is worth noting that emerging IoT applications are even more throughput demanding and latency-sensitive which makes communication networks a practical bottleneck for the service provisioning. This thesis aims to eliminate the limitations of wireless access, via the improvement of connectivity and throughput between the devices on the edge, as well as their network identification, which is fundamentally important for IoT service management. The introduction begins with a discussion on the emerging IoT applications and their demands. Subsequent chapters introduce scenarios of interest, describe the proposed solutions and provide selected performance evaluation results. Specifically, we start with research on the use of degraded memory chips for network identification of IoT devices as an alternative to conventional methods, such as IMEI; these methods are not vulnerable to tampering and cloning. Further, we introduce our contributions for improving connectivity and throughput among IoT devices on the edge in a case where the mobile network infrastructure is limited or totally unavailable. Finally, we conclude the introduction with a summary of the results achieved

Future benefits and applications of intelligent on-board processing to VSAT services

The trends and roles of VSAT services in the year 2010 time frame are examined based on an overall network and service model for that period. An estimate of the VSAT traffic is then made and the service and general network requirements are identified. In order to accommodate these traffic needs, four satellite VSAT architectures based on the use of fixed or scanning multibeam antennas in conjunction with IF switching or onboard regeneration and baseband processing are suggested. The performance of each of these architectures is assessed and the key enabling technologies are identified

The new enhancement of UMTS: HSDPA and HSUPA

During the last two decades, the world of the mobile communications grew a lot, as a consequence of the increasing necessity of people to communicate. Now, the mobile communications still need to improve for satisfies the user demands. The new enhancement of UMTS in concrete HSDPA and HSUPA is one of these improvements that the society needs. HSDPA and HSUPA which together are called HSPA, give to the users higher data rates in downlink and uplink. The higher data rates permit to the operators give more different types of services and at the same time with better quality. As a result, people can do several new applications with their mobile terminals like applications that before a computer and internet connection were required, now it is possible to do directly with the mobile terminal. This thesis consists in study these new technologies denominated HSDPA and HSUPA and thus know better the last tendencies in the mobile communications. Also it has a roughly idea about the future tendencies

Self organization in 3GPP long term evolution networks

Mobiele en breedbandige internettoegang is realiteit. De internetgeneratie vindt het immers normaal om overal breedbandige internettoegang te hebben. Vandaag zijn er al 5,9 miljard mobiele abonnees ( 87% van de wereldbevolking) en 20% daarvan hebben toegang tot een mobiele breedbandige internetverbinding. Dit wordt aangeboden door 3G (derde generatie) technologieën zoals HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) en 4G (vierde generatie) technologieën zoals LTE (Long Term Evolution). De vraag naar hoogkwalitatieve diensten stelt de mobiele netwerkoperatoren en de verkopers van telecommunicatieapparatuur voor nieuwe uitdagingen: zij moeten nieuwe oplossingen vinden om hun diensten steeds sneller en met een hogere kwaliteit aan te bieden. De nieuwe LTE-standaard brengt niet alleen hogere pieksnelheden en kleinere vertragingen. Het heeft daarnaast ook nieuwe functionaliteiten in petto die zeer aantrekkelijk zijn voor de mobiele netwerkoperator: de integratie van zelfregelende functies die kunnen ingezet worden bij de planning van het netwerk, het uitrollen van een netwerk en het controleren van allerhande netwerkmechanismen (o.a. handover, spreiding van de belasting over de cellen). Dit proefschrift optimaliseert enkele van deze zelfregelende functies waardoor de optimalisatie van een mobiel netwerk snel en automatisch kan gebeuren. Hierdoor verwacht men lagere kosten voor de mobiele operator en een hogere kwaliteit van de aangeboden diensten

Distributed Failure Restoration for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Tactical Communication Networks

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (A TM) is an attractive choice for future military communication systems because it can provide high throughput and support multi-service applications. Furthermore its use is consistent with the 'off the shelf technology policy that is currently operated by the Defence Engineering Research Agency of Great Britain. However, A TM has been developed as a civil standard and is designed to operate in network infrastructures with very low failure rates. In contrast, tactical networks are much less reliable. Indeed tactical networks operate on the premise that failures, particularly node failures, are expected. Hence, efficient, automatic failure restoration schemes are essential if an A TM based tactical network is to remain operational. The main objective of this research is the proposal and verification of one or more new restoration algorithms that meet the specific requirements of tactical networks. The aspects of ATM networks that influence restoration algorithms' implementation are discussed. In particular, the features of A TM networks such as the concept of Virtual Paths Virtual Channels and OAM (Operation And Maintenance) mechanisms that facilitate implementation of efficient restoration techniques. The unique characteristics of tactical networks and their impact on restoration are also presented. A significant part of the research was the study and evaluation of existing approaches to failure restoration in civil networks. A critical analysis of the suitability of these approaches to the tactical environment shows no one restoration algorithm fully meets the requirements of tactical networks. Consequently, two restoration algorithms for tactical A TM networks, DRA-TN (Dynamic Restoration Algorithm for Tactical Networks) and PPR-TN (Pre-planned Restoration Algorithm for Tactical Networks), are proposed and described in detail. Since the primary concern of restoration in tactical networks is the recovery of high priority connections the proposed algorithms attempt to restore high-priority connections by disrupting low-priority calls. Also, a number of additional mechanisms are proposed to reduce the use of bandwidth, which is a scarce resource in tactical networks. It is next argued that software simulation is the most appropriate method to prove the consistency of the proposed algorithms, assess their performance and test them on different network topologies as well as traffic and failure conditions. For this reason a simulation software package was designed and built specifically to model the proposed restoration algorithms. The design of the package is presented in detail and the most important implementation issues are discussed. The proposed restoration algorithms are modelled on three network topologies under various traffic loads, and their performance compared against the performance of known algorithms proposed for civil networks. It is shown that DRA-TN and PPR-TN provide better restoration of higher priority traffic. Furthermore, as the traffic load increases the relative performance of the DRA-TN and PPR-TN algorithms increases. The DRA-TN and PPR-TN algorithms are also compared and their advantages and disadvantages noted. Also, recommendations are given about the applicability of the proposed algorithms, and some practical implementation issues are discussed. The number of problems that need further study are briefly described.Defence Engineering Research Agency of Great Britai

Integrating secure mobile P2P systems and Wireless Sensor Networks

Aquesta tesi tracta de les diferents limitacions trobades a WSN per a habilitar-ne el desplegament en nous escenaris i facilitar la difusió de la informació obtinguda. A un nivell baix, ens centrem en el consum d'energia, mentre que, a un nivell més alt, ens focalitzem en la difusió i la seguretat de la informació. Reduïm el consum d'una mote individual en xarxes amb patrons de trànsit dinàmic mitjançant la definició d'una funció de planificació basada en el conegut controlador PID i allarguem la vida d'una WSN globalment distribuint equitativament el consum energètic de totes les motes, disminuint el nombre d'intervencions necessàries per a canviar bateries i el cost associat. Per tal d'afavorir la difusió de la informació provinent d'una WSN, hem proposat jxSensor, una capa d'integració entre les WSN i el conegut sistema P2P JXTA. Com que tractem informació sensible, hem proposat una capa d'anonimat a JXTA i un mecanisme d'autenticació lleuger per a la seva versió mòbil.Esta tesis trata las diferentes limitaciones encontradas en WSN para habilitar su despliegue en nuevos escenarios, así como facilitar la diseminación de la información obtenida. A bajo nivel, nos centramos en el consumo de energía, mientras que, a un nivel más alto, nos focalizamos en la diseminación y seguridad de la información. Reducimos el consumo de una mota individual en redes con patrones de tráfico dinámico mediante la definición de una función de planificación basada en el conocido controlador PID y alargamos la vida de una WSN globalmente distribuyendo equitativamente el consumo energético de todas las motas, disminuyendo el número de intervenciones requeridas para cambiar baterías y su coste asociado. Para favorecer la diseminación de la información procedente de una WSN hemos propuesto jxSensor, una capa de integración entre las WSN y el conocido sistema P2P JXTA. Como estamos tratando con información sensible, hemos propuesto una capa de anonimato en JXTA y un mecanismo de autenticación ligero para su versión móvil.This thesis addresses different limitations found in WSNs in order to enable their deployment in new scenarios as well as to make it easier to disseminate the gathered information. At a lower level, we concentrate on energy consumption while, at a higher level, we focus on the dissemination and security of information. The consumption of an individual mote in networks with dynamic traffic patterns is reduced by defining a scheduling function based on the well-known PID controller. Additionally, the life of a WSN is extended by equally distributing the consumption of all the motes, which reduces the number of interventions required to replace batteries as well as the associated cost. To help the dissemination of information coming from a WSN we have proposed jxSensor, which is an integration layer between WSNs and the well-known JXTA P2P system. As we are dealing with sensitive information, we have proposed an anonymity layer in JXTA and a light authentication method in its mobile version