Seamless Multimedia Delivery Within a Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Environment: Are We There Yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurizes the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of quality of experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty, and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users' quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: 1) adaptation; 2) energy efficiency; and 3) multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges, and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided

Systems and Methods for Measuring and Improving End-User Application Performance on Mobile Devices

In today's rapidly growing smartphone society, the time users are spending on their smartphones is continuing to grow and mobile applications are becoming the primary medium for providing services and content to users. With such fast paced growth in smart-phone usage, cellular carriers and internet service providers continuously upgrade their infrastructure to the latest technologies and expand their capacities to improve the performance and reliability of their network and to satisfy exploding user demand for mobile data. On the other side of the spectrum, content providers and e-commerce companies adopt the latest protocols and techniques to provide smooth and feature-rich user experiences on their applications. To ensure a good quality of experience, monitoring how applications perform on users' devices is necessary. Often, network and content providers lack such visibility into the end-user application performance. In this dissertation, we demonstrate that having visibility into the end-user perceived performance, through system design for efficient and coordinated active and passive measurements of end-user application and network performance, is crucial for detecting, diagnosing, and addressing performance problems on mobile devices. My dissertation consists of three projects to support this statement. First, to provide such continuous monitoring on smartphones with constrained resources that operate in such a highly dynamic mobile environment, we devise efficient, adaptive, and coordinated systems, as a platform, for active and passive measurements of end-user performance. Second, using this platform and other passive data collection techniques, we conduct an in-depth user trial of mobile multipath to understand how Multipath TCP (MPTCP) performs in practice. Our measurement study reveals several limitations of MPTCP. Based on the insights gained from our measurement study, we propose two different schemes to address the identified limitations of MPTCP. Last, we show how to provide visibility into the end- user application performance for internet providers and in particular home WiFi routers by passively monitoring users' traffic and utilizing per-app models mapping various network quality of service (QoS) metrics to the application performance.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146014/1/ashnik_1.pd

Seamless multimedia delivery within a heterogeneous wireless networks environment: are we there yet?

The increasing popularity of live video streaming from mobile devices such as Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc. pressurises the network operators to increase the capacity of their networks. However, a simple increase in system capacity will not be enough without considering the provisioning of Quality of Experience (QoE) as the basis for network control, customer loyalty and retention rate and thus increase in network operators revenue. As QoE is gaining strong momentum especially with increasing users’ quality expectations, the focus is now on proposing innovative solutions to enable QoE when delivering video content over heterogeneous wireless networks. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multimedia delivery solutions, identifies the problems and provides a comprehensive classification of related state-of-the-art approaches following three key directions: adaptation, energy efficiency and multipath content delivery. Discussions, challenges and open issues on the seamless multimedia provisioning faced by the current and next generation of wireless networks are also provided

Delphi: A Software Controller for Mobile Network Selection

This paper presents Delphi, a mobile software controller that helps applications select the best network among available choices for their data transfers. Delphi optimizes a specified objective such as transfer completion time, or energy per byte transferred, or the monetary cost of a transfer. It has four components: a performance predictor that uses features gathered by a network monitor, and a traffic profiler to estimate transfer sizes near the start of a transfer, all fed into a network selector that uses the prediction and transfer size estimate to optimize an objective.For each transfer, Delphi either recommends the best single network to use, or recommends Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), but crucially selects the network for MPTCP s primary subflow . The choice of primary subflow has a strong impact onthe transfer completion time, especially for short transfers.We designed and implemented Delphi in Linux. It requires no application modifications. Our evaluation shows that Delphi reduces application network transfer time by 46% for Web browsing and by 49% for video streaming, comparedwith Android s default policy of always using Wi-Fi when it is available. Delphi can also be configured to achieve high throughput while being battery-efficient: in this configuration, it achieves 1.9x the throughput of Android s default policy while only consuming 6% more energy

Exploring the benefits of multipath TCP In wireless networks

The revolution of the information society has created a completely new situation in the telecommunications markets. As the average user data demands in today's society grow bigger, since users nowadays are demanding a faster, wider and more reliable communication service from the operators so they can watch more videos, listen to more music or access the Internet in general with a better quality, a lower latency and seamlessly to the network access they are using, the network operators face the challenge to fit this demands into their existing networks. This has forced the operators to think in terms of how optimal they are on providing their services if they want to fulfil the customer requirements in this new environment. At the same time we need to keep in mind that simultaneously to this new user's habits smartphones revolution has created, it has also made it possible to have accessible communication devices which have the necessary hardware and horsepower to keep different network interfaces up, and so it has become a common thing to reach the Internet via different kind of networks along the day. Even more it has enabled a rich communications environment where different connection possibilities are available to the user at the same time. In this context, the idea of multipath communication emerges. The idea of taking advantage of a dense wireless communication offer through the use of multipath (sending and receiving information through different network interfaces simultaneously) looks promising to overcome a situation where user's communications services demand grows and at the same time the mobile network load becomes stronger. The newfangled protocol Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a technology which is enabling in practice this king of multipath communication, and it is the focus of this project to dig into possible benefits the protocol may bring to the table by defining a set of use cases, test-bed implementations and experiments with MPTCP which we present and analyse in this document.La revolución de la sociedad de la información ha creado una situación que es completamente nueva en los mercados de telecomunicaciones. A medida que el usuario medio aumenta su demanda de datos, ya que hoy en día los hábitos de estos pasan por conexiones más rápidas y fiables que les permitan reproducir contenido (video, música, páginas web) con mejor calidad, menor latencia y transparentemente a la red que estén utilizando, los operadores de red afrontan nuevos retos a la hora de encajar estas expectativas del usuario dentro de las posibilidades que ofrece la red. Esto está forzando a los operadores a buscar una manera más óptima de gestionar el tráfico de sus clientes para así poder satisfacer la demanda de unos servicios de mayor calidad que estos realizan. Al mismo tiempo hay que tener en mente que, de la misma manera que el impacto que esta esta revolución de los smartphones ha tenido en los hábitos de consumo del usuario ha creado nuevos y complejos problemas, también ha hecho posible que existan dispositivos económicamente accesibles para el público con el hardware y la capacidad de procesamiento necesarias para incorporar múltiples adaptadores de red, y esto a su vez ha llevado a al escenario actual en el que comúnmente coexisten en el mismo lugar diferentes posibilidades para conectarse a internet (típicamente Wi-Fi y conexión móvil, pero también podríamos nombrar tecnologías como el Bluetooth o la clásica conexión de Ethernet en ordenadores portátiles) Es en este contexto en el que surge la idea de la comunicación multi-trayecto. La idea de aprovechar un entorno con una densa pero heterogénea oferta de conexión a través del uso del multi-trayecto (enviar y recibir información a través de múltiples interfaces de red simultáneamente) aparece como una posibilidad prometedora para los operadores para mejorar la experiencia del usuario al mismo tiempo que se gestiona el tráfico en la red de una manera más eficiente. El protocolo experimental Multipath TCP es una extensión del TCP clásico que hace posible este uso simultáneo de múltiples interfaces para la comunicación, y es objetivo de este proyecto diseñar, implementar y testear el protocolo en diferentes casos de uso en los que el multi-trayecto ofrece, a priori, algunas ventajas. En las siguientes páginas explicaremos que casos de uso hemos elegido para probar el protocolo y por qué, cómo hemos diseñado e implementado los bancos de pruebas y que resultados hemos obtenido en nuestro experimentos sobre el rendimiento del protocolo, realizando al mismo tiempo un análisis crítico de los resultados de los resultados.Ingeniería de Telecomunicació