Content-aware resource allocation model for IPTV delivery networks

Nowadays, with the evolution of digital video broadcasting, as well as, the advent of high speed broadband networks, a new era of TV services has emerged known as IPTV. IPTV is a system that employs the high speed broadband networks to deliver TV services to the subscribers. From the service provider viewpoint, the challenge in IPTV systems is how to build delivery networks that exploits the resources efficiently and reduces the service cost, as well. However, designing such delivery networks affected by many factors including choosing the suitable network architecture, load balancing, resources waste, and cost reduction. Furthermore, IPTV contents characteristics, particularly; size, popularity, and interactivity play an important role in balancing the load and avoiding the resources waste for delivery networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of resource allocation for IPTV delivery networks over the recent architecture, peer-service area architecture. The Genetic Algorithm as an optimization tool has been used to find the optimal provisioning parameters including storage, bandwidth, and CPU consumption. The experiments have been conducted on two data sets with different popularity distributions. The experiments have been conducted on two popularity distributions. The experimental results showed the impact of content status on the resource allocation process

Smart PIN: performance and cost-oriented context-aware personal information network

The next generation of networks will involve interconnection of heterogeneous individual networks such as WPAN, WLAN, WMAN and Cellular network, adopting the IP as common infrastructural protocol and providing virtually always-connected network. Furthermore, there are many devices which enable easy acquisition and storage of information as pictures, movies, emails, etc. Therefore, the information overload and divergent content’s characteristics make it difficult for users to handle their data in manual way. Consequently, there is a need for personalised automatic services which would enable data exchange across heterogeneous network and devices. To support these personalised services, user centric approaches for data delivery across the heterogeneous network are also required. In this context, this thesis proposes Smart PIN - a novel performance and cost-oriented context-aware Personal Information Network. Smart PIN's architecture is detailed including its network, service and management components. Within the service component, two novel schemes for efficient delivery of context and content data are proposed: Multimedia Data Replication Scheme (MDRS) and Quality-oriented Algorithm for Multiple-source Multimedia Delivery (QAMMD). MDRS supports efficient data accessibility among distributed devices using data replication which is based on a utility function and a minimum data set. QAMMD employs a buffer underflow avoidance scheme for streaming, which achieves high multimedia quality without content adaptation to network conditions. Simulation models for MDRS and QAMMD were built which are based on various heterogeneous network scenarios. Additionally a multiple-source streaming based on QAMMS was implemented as a prototype and tested in an emulated network environment. Comparative tests show that MDRS and QAMMD perform significantly better than other approaches

Modelling contents status for IPTV delivery networks

Since IPTV has been invented, IPTV is considered a dominant technology to distribute high quality videos and live channels anytime anywhere over challenging environment to end users who are having different preferences and demands. Presently, IPTV service providers manage IPTV delivery networks, in terms of contents, channels, resources, based on contents popularity distribution and/or users’ preferences only. Although content popularity and users’ preferences play an important role to cope with the increasing demand of IPTV contents/channels, these two measures fail in producing efficient IPTV delivery networks For that, IPTV delivery network designing should integrate the IPTV content characteristics like size, interactivity, the rapid changing lifetime. Therefore, the idea of this paper is to build a mathematical model that integrates all these factors in one concept called IPTV content status. Modeling the contents status according to its characteristics is an important point to design Content-Aware IPTV delivery networks.The experimental results showed the superiority of modeling IPTV content status in balancing the load and reducing the resources waste

Balance content allocation scheme for peer-service area CDN architecture for IPTV services

One of the main problems in IPTV technology is how to manage the huge amount of multimedia contents efficiently to meet the demands of users especially for Video on Demand (VoD) services.Content Distribution Networks (CDN) are used to solve this problem but the problem of load imbalance among servers still exists due to the dynamic changes in contents and user interests in an IPTV environment.In the VoD context, many content storage management architecture models are proposed: single point, hierarchal, distributed, and service peer area architectures.In the this paper we choose peer-service area architecture for CDN to study the load imbalance problem and try to handle it by modifying peer-service area architecture and proposing a balanced content allocation scheme that solves the load imbalance problem by replicating the contents based on their popularity.Experimental results show that this proposed allocation scheme can maintain the load balancing among servers and avoid over/under utilization of servers

Cooperative announcement-based caching for video-on-demand streaming

Recently, video-on-demand (VoD) streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have gained a lot of popularity. This has led to a strong increase in bandwidth capacity requirements in the network. To reduce this network load, the design of appropriate caching strategies is of utmost importance. Based on the fact that, typically, a video stream is temporally segmented into smaller chunks that can be accessed and decoded independently, cache replacement strategies have been developed that take advantage of this temporal structure in the video. In this paper, two caching strategies are proposed that additionally take advantage of the phenomenon of binge watching, where users stream multiple consecutive episodes of the same series, reported by recent user behavior studies to become the everyday behavior. Taking into account this information allows us to predict future segment requests, even before the video playout has started. Two strategies are proposed, both with a different level of coordination between the caches in the network. Using a VoD request trace based on binge watching user characteristics, the presented algorithms have been thoroughly evaluated in multiple network topologies with different characteristics, showing their general applicability. It was shown that in a realistic scenario, the proposed election-based caching strategy can outperform the state-of-the-art by 20% in terms of cache hit ratio while using 4% less network bandwidth

A utility-based priority scheduling scheme for multimedia delivery over LTE networks

With the mobile networks migrating towards LTE-Advanced and all-IP networks, people expect to connect to the Internet anytime, anywhere and from any IP-connected device. Moreover, nowadays people tend to spend much of their time consuming multimedia content from various devices with heterogeneous characteristics (e.g., TV screen, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.). In order to support uninterrupted, continuous, and smooth video streaming with reduced delay, jitter, and packet loss to their customers, network operators must be able to differentiate between their offerings according to device characteristics, including screen resolution. This paper proposes a novel Utility-based Priority Scheduling (UPS) algorithm which considers device differentiation when supporting high quality delivery of multimedia services over LTE networks. The priority decision is based on device classification, mobile device energy consumption and multimedia stream tolerance to packet loss ratio. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed priority-based scheduling algorithm in comparison with two classic approaches

Key distribution technique for IPTV services with support for admission control and user defined groups

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Poor Man's Content Centric Networking (with TCP)

A number of different architectures have been proposed in support of data-oriented or information-centric networking. Besides a similar visions, they share the need for designing a new networking architecture. We present an incrementally deployable approach to content-centric networking based upon TCP. Content-aware senders cooperate with probabilistically operating routers for scalable content delivery (to unmodified clients), effectively supporting opportunistic caching for time-shifted access as well as de-facto synchronous multicast delivery. Our approach is application protocol-independent and provides support beyond HTTP caching or managed CDNs. We present our protocol design along with a Linux-based implementation and some initial feasibility checks

DOAS: device-oriented adaptive multimedia scheme for 3GPP LTE systems

The growing popularity of the high-end mobile computing devices – smartphones, tablets, notebooks and more – equipped with high-speed network access, enables the mobile user to watch multimedia content from any source on any screen, at any time, while on the move or stationary. In this context, the network operators must ensure smooth video streaming with the lowest service delay, jitter, and packet loss. This paper proposes a resource efficient Device-Oriented Adaptive Multimedia Scheme (DOAS) built on top of the downlink scheduler in LTE-Advanced systems. DOAS bases its adaptation decision on the end-user device display resolution information and Quality of Service (QoS). DOAS is implemented on top of the Proportional Fair (PF) and the well-known Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (M-LWDF) scheduling algorithms within the 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced system. The performance of the proposed adaptive multimedia scheme was analyzed and compared against a non-adaptive solution in terms of throughput, packet loss and PSNR