Utility Optimal Scheduling and Admission Control for Adaptive Video Streaming in Small Cell Networks

We consider the jointly optimal design of a transmission scheduling and admission control policy for adaptive video streaming over small cell networks. We formulate the problem as a dynamic network utility maximization and observe that it naturally decomposes into two subproblems: admission control and transmission scheduling. The resulting algorithms are simple and suitable for distributed implementation. The admission control decisions involve each user choosing the quality of the video chunk asked for download, based on the network congestion in its neighborhood. This form of admission control is compatible with the current video streaming technology based on the DASH protocol over TCP connections. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under realistic assumptions for a small-cell network.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted and will be presented at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 201

VECTORS: Video communication through opportunistic relays and scalable video coding

Crowd-sourced video distribution is frequently of interest in the local vicinity. In this paper, we propose a novel design to transfer such content over opportunistic networks with adaptive quality encoding to achieve reasonable delay bounds. The video segments are transmitted between source and destination in a delay tolerant manner using the Nearby Connections Android library. This implementation can be applied to multiple domains, including farm monitoring, wildlife, and environmental tracking, disaster response scenarios, etc. In this work, we present the design of an opportunistic contact based system, and we discuss basic results for the trial runs within our institute.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, and under 3000 words for submission to the SoftwareX journa

Wireless Heterogeneous Networks and Next Generation Internet

The recent advances in wireless access technologies as well as the increasing number of mobile applications have made Wireless Internet a reality. A wide variety of bandwidth demanding services including high speed data delivery and multimedia communication have been materialized through the convergence of the next generation Internet and heterogeneous wireless networks. However, providing even higher bandwidth and richer applications necessitates a fundamental understanding of wireless Internet architecture and the interactions between heterogeneous users. Consequently, fundamental advances in many concepts of the wireless Internet are required for the ultimate goal of communication anytime anywhere. This special issue of the ACM Mobile Networks and Applications Journal is dedicated to the recent advances in the area of Wireless Internet. We accepted 10 papers out of 59 submissions from all over the world with a 17% acceptance rate. Papers describing management schemes, protocols, models, evaluation methods, and experimental studies of Wireless Internet are included in this special issue to provide a broad view of recent advances in this field

Design and analysis of a beacon-less routing protocol for large volume content dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Largevolumecontentdisseminationispursuedbythegrowingnumberofhighquality applications for Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks(VANETs), e.g., the live road surveillance service and the video-based overtaking assistant service. For the highly dynamical vehicular network topology, beacon-less routing protocols have been proven to be efficient in achieving a balance between the system performance and the control overhead. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, the routing design for large volume content has not been well considered in the previous work, which will introduce new challenges, e.g., the enhanced connectivity requirement for a radio link. In this paper, a link Lifetime-aware Beacon-less Routing Protocol (LBRP) is designed for large volume content delivery in VANETs. Each vehicle makes the forwarding decision based on the message header information and its current state, including the speed and position information. A semi-Markov process analytical model is proposed to evaluate the expected delay in constructing one routing path for LBRP. Simulations show that the proposed LBRP scheme outperforms the traditional dissemination protocols in providing a low end-to-end delay. The analytical model is shown to exhibit a good match on the delay estimation with Monte Carlo simulations, as well

Band Codes for Energy-Efficient Network Coding with Application to P2P Mobile Streaming

A key problem in random network coding (NC) lies in the complexity and energy consumption associated with the packet decoding processes, which hinder its application in mobile environments. Controlling and hence limiting such factors has always been an important but elusive research goal, since the packet degree distribution, which is the main factor driving the complexity, is altered in a non-deterministic way by the random recombinations at the network nodes. In this paper we tackle this problem proposing Band Codes (BC), a novel class of network codes specifically designed to preserve the packet degree distribution during packet encoding, ecombination and decoding. BC are random codes over GF(2) that exhibit low decoding complexity, feature limited and controlled degree distribution by construction, and hence allow to effectively apply NC even in energy-constrained scenarios. In particular, in this paper we motivate and describe our new design and provide a thorough analysis of its performance. We provide numerical simulations of the performance of BC in order to validate the analysis and assess the overhead of BC with respect to a onventional NC scheme. Moreover, peer-to-peer media streaming experiments with a random-push protocol show that BC reduce the decoding complexity by a factor of two, to a point where NC-based mobile streaming to mobile devices becomes practically feasible.Comment: To be published in IEEE Transacions on Multimedi