Random Linear Network Coding for 5G Mobile Video Delivery

An exponential increase in mobile video delivery will continue with the demand for higher resolution, multi-view and large-scale multicast video services. Novel fifth generation (5G) 3GPP New Radio (NR) standard will bring a number of new opportunities for optimizing video delivery across both 5G core and radio access networks. One of the promising approaches for video quality adaptation, throughput enhancement and erasure protection is the use of packet-level random linear network coding (RLNC). In this review paper, we discuss the integration of RLNC into the 5G NR standard, building upon the ideas and opportunities identified in 4G LTE. We explicitly identify and discuss in detail novel 5G NR features that provide support for RLNC-based video delivery in 5G, thus pointing out to the promising avenues for future research.Comment: Invited paper for Special Issue "Network and Rateless Coding for Video Streaming" - MDPI Informatio

Packet scheduling in satellite LTE networks employing MIMO technology.

Doctor of Philosophy in Electronic Engineering. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2014.Rapid growth in the number of mobile users and ongoing demand for different types of telecommunication services from mobile networks, have driven the need for new technologies that provide high data rates and satisfy their respective Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, irrespective of their location. The satellite component will play a vital role in these new technologies, since the terrestrial component is not able to provide global coverage due to economic and technical limitations. This has led to the emergence of Satellite Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks which employ Multiple-In Multiple-Out (MIMO) technology. In order to achieve the set QoS targets, required data rates and fairness among various users with different traffic demands in the satellite LTE network, it is crucial to design an effective scheduling and a sub-channel allocation scheme that will provide an optimal balance of all these requirements. It is against this background that this study investigates packet scheduling in satellite LTE networks employing MIMO technology. One of the main foci of this study is to propose new cross-layer based packet scheduling schemes, tagged Queue Aware Fair (QAF) and Channel Based Queue Sensitive (CBQS) scheduling schemes. The proposed schemes are designed to improve both fairness and network throughput without compromising users’ QoS demands, as they provide a good trade-off between throughput, QoS demands and fairness. They also improve the performance of the network in comparison with other scheduling schemes. The comparison is determined through simulations. Due to the fact that recent schedulers provide a trade-off among major performance indices, a new performance index to evaluate the overall performance of each scheduler is derived. This index is tagged the Scheduling Performance Metric (SPM). The study also investigates the impact of the long propagation delay and different effective isotropic radiated powers on the performance of the satellite LTE network. The results show that both have a significant impact on network performance. In order to actualize an optimal scheduling scheme for the satellite LTE network, the scheduling problem is formulated as an optimization function and an optimal solution is obtained using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker multipliers. The obtained Near Optimal Scheduling Scheme (NOSS), whose aim is to maximize the network throughput without compromising users’ QoS demands and fairness, provides better throughput and spectral efficiency performance than other schedulers. The comparison is determined through simulations. Based on the new SPM, the proposed NOSS1 and NOSS2 outperform other schedulers. A stability analysis is also presented to determine whether or not the proposed scheduler will provide a stable network. A fluid limit technique is used for the stability analysis. Finally, a sub-channel allocation scheme is proposed, with the aim of providing a better sub-channel or Physical Resource Block (PRB) allocation method, tagged the Utility Auction Based (UAB) subchannel allocation scheme that will improve the system performance of the satellite LTE network. The results show that the proposed method performs better than the other scheme. The comparison is obtained through simulations

Traffic Scheduling in Point-to-Multipoint OFDMA-based Systems

The new generation of wireless networks (e.g., WiMAX, LTE-Advanced, Cognitive Radio) support many high resource-consuming services (e.g., VoIP, video conference, multiplayer interactive gaming, multimedia streaming, digital video broadcasting, mobile commerce). The main problem of such networks is that the bandwidth is limited, besides to be subject to fading process, and shared among multiple users. Therefore, a combination of sophisticated transmission techniques (e.g., OFDMA) and proper packet scheduling algorithms is necessary, in order to provide applications with suitable quality of service. This Thesis addresses the problem of traffic scheduling in Point-to-Multipoint OFDMA-based systems. We formally prove that in such systems, even a simple scheduling problem of a Service Class at a time, is NP-complete, therefore, computationally intractable. An optimal solution is unfeasible in term of time, thus, fast and simple scheduling heuristics are needed. First, we address the Best Effort traffic scheduling issue, in a system adopting variable-length Frames, with the objective of producing a legal schedule (i.e., the one meeting all system constraints) of minimum length. Besides, we present fast and simple heuristics, which generate suboptimal solutions, and evaluate their performance in the average case, as in the worst one. Then, we investigate the scheduling of Real Time traffic, with the objective of meeting as many deadlines as possible, or equivalently, minimizing the packet drop ratio. Specifically, we propose two scheduling heuristics, which apply two different resource allocation mechanisms, and evaluate their average-case performance by means of a simulation experiment

Modeling And Dynamic Resource Allocation For High Definition And Mobile Video Streams

Video streaming traffic has been surging in the last few years, which has resulted in an increase of its Internet traffic share on a daily basis. The importance of video streaming management has been emphasized with the advent of High Definition: HD) video streaming, as it requires by its nature more network resources. In this dissertation, we provide a better support for managing HD video traffic over both wireless and wired networks through several contributions. We present a simple, general and accurate video source model: Simplified Seasonal ARIMA Model: SAM). SAM is capable of capturing the statistical characteristics of video traces with less than 5% difference from their calculated optimal models. SAM is shown to be capable of modeling video traces encoded with MPEG-4 Part2, MPEG-4 Part10, and Scalable Video Codec: SVC) standards, using various encoding settings. We also provide a large and publicly-available collection of HD video traces along with their analyses results. These analyses include a full statistical analysis of HD videos, in addition to modeling, factor and cluster analyses. These results show that by using SAM, we can achieve up to 50% improvement in video traffic prediction accuracy. In addition, we developed several video tools, including an HD video traffic generator based on our model. Finally, to improve HD video streaming resource management, we present a SAM-based delay-guaranteed dynamic resource allocation: DRA) scheme that can provide up to 32.4% improvement in bandwidth utilization

Efficient and Virtualized Scheduling for OFDM-Based High Mobility Wireless Communications Objects

Services providers (SPs) in the radio platform technology standard long term evolution (LTE) systems are enduring many challenges in order to accommodate the rapid expansion of mobile data usage. The modern technologies demonstrate new challenges to SPs, for example, reducing the cost of the capital and operating expenditures while supporting high data throughput per customer, extending battery life-per-charge of the cell phone devices, and supporting high mobility communications with fast and seamless handover (HO) networking architecture. In this thesis, a variety of optimized techniques aimed at providing innovative solutions for such challenges are explored. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the benefits and challenges of deploying virtualized resource sharing concept. Wherein, SPs achieving a different schedulers policy are sharing evolved network B, allowing SPs to customize their efforts and provide service requirements; as a promising solution for reducing operational and capital expenditures, leading to potential energy savings, and supporting higher peak rates. The second part, formulates the optimized power allocation problem in a virtualized scheme in LTE uplink systems, aiming to extend the mobile devices’ battery utilization time per charge. While, the third part extrapolates a proposed hybrid-HO (HY-HO) technique, that can enhance the system performance in terms of latency and HO reliability at cell boundary for high mobility objects (up to 350 km/hr; wherein, HO will occur more frequent). The main contributions of this thesis are in designing optimal binary integer programmingbased and suboptimal heuristic (with complexity reduction) scheduling algorithms subject to exclusive and contiguous allocation, maximum transmission power, and rate constraints. Moreover, designing the HY-HO based on the combination of soft and hard HO was able to enhance the system performance in term of latency, interruption time and reliability during HO. The results prove that the proposed solutions effectively contribute in addressing the challenges caused by the demand for high data rates and power transmission in mobile networks especially in virtualized resources sharing scenarios that can support high data rates with improving quality of services (QoSs)

Cross-layer Optimization for Video Delivery over Wireless Networks

As video streaming is becoming the most popular application of Internet mo- bile, the design and the optimization of video communications over wireless networks is attracting increasingly attention from both academia and indus- try. The main challenges are to enhance the quality of service support, and to dynamically adapt the transmitted video streams to the network condition. The cross-layer methods, i.e., the exchange of information among different layers of the system, is one of the key concepts to be exploited to achieve this goals. In this thesis we propose novel cross-layer optimization frameworks for scalable video coding (SVC) delivery and for HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) application over the downlink and the uplink of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless networks. They jointly address optimized content-aware rate adaptation and radio resource allocation (RRA) with the aim of maximiz- ing the sum of the achievable rates while minimizing the quality difference among multiple videos. For multi-user SVC delivery over downlink wireless systems, where IP/TV is the most representative application, we decompose the optimization problem and we propose the novel iterative local approxi- mation algorithm to derive the optimal solution, by also presenting optimal algorithms to solve the resulting two sub-problems. For multiple SVC de- livery over uplink wireless systems, where healt-care services are the most attractive and challenging application, we propose joint video adaptation and aggregation directly performed at the application layer of the transmit- ting equipment, which exploits the guaranteed bit-rate (GBR) provided by the low-complexity sub-optimal RRA solutions proposed. Finally, we pro- pose a quality-fair adaptive streaming solution to deliver fair video quality to HAS clients in a LTE cell by adaptively selecting the prescribed (GBR) of each user according to the video content in addition to the channel condi- tion. Extensive numerical evaluations show the significant enhancements of the proposed strategies with respect to other state-of-the-art frameworks

Design and analysis of scheduling algorithms for next generation broadband wireless access systems

Efficient utilization of network resources is a key goal for emerging Broadband Wireless Access Systems (BWAS). This is a complex goal to achieve due to the heterogeneous service nature and diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of various applications that BWAS support. Packet scheduling is an important activity that affects BWAS QoS outcomes. This thesis proposes a new packet scheduling mechanism that improves QoS in mobile wireless networks which exploit IP as a transport technology for data transfer between BWAS base stations and mobile users at the radio transmission layer. In order to improve BWAS QoS the new packet algorithm makes changes at both the IP and the radio layers. The new packet scheduling algorithm exploits handoff priority scheduling principles and takes into account buffer occupancy and channel conditions. The packet scheduling mechanism also incorporates the concept of fairness. The algorithm also offers an opportunity to maximize the carriers’ revenue at various traffic situations. Performance results were obtained by computer simulation and compared to the well-known algorithms. Results show that by exploiting the new packet scheduling algorithm, the transport system is able to provide a low handoff packet drop rate, low packet forwarding rate, low packet delay, ensure fairness amongst the users of different services and generates higher revenue for the telecom carriers. Furthermore this research proposes a new and novel measure named “satisfaction factor to measure the efficacy of various scheduling schemes and finally this s research also proposes four performance measurements metric for NodeB’s of Next Generation Wireless Network