Signalling Transmission for Internet Television

Signalizace v sítích pracujících s internetovým protokolem (IP) je používána pro monitorování a řízení činnosti sítě. Tato práce se zabývá přenosem signalizace skrze IP sítě pro velké skupiny komunikujících prvků a navrhuje škálovatelné řešení, jak pro malá, tak pro velká vysílání internetových televize (IPTV). Hlavní přínos práce spočívá v návrhu algoritmů pro ustavení optimálního hierarchického stromu na základě dostupných zdrojů a s ohledem na geografickou a virtuální polohu jednotlivých stanic. Pro účely optimalizace byly použity jak simulace s parametry globální experimentální sítě Planetlab, tak byly navržené algoritmy a protokoly nasazeny do reálného provozu v této síti.A signalization in an Internet protocol environment is commonly used for monitoring quality of service and other parameters of a network. This thesis is involved in transmission of signalization through internet protocol networks and proposes scalable solution for small and even for large-scale internet television broadcasting. The main contribution of this thesis lies in design and validation of optimal hierarchical tree on the basis of resources assigned. This is done in respect to geographical distance, network distance of each particular member of the hierarchical structure. For the design of algorithms simulations and global experimental network were used.

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

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

Use of locator/identifier separation to improve the future internet routing system

The Internet evolved from its early days of being a small research network to become a critical infrastructure many organizations and individuals rely on. One dimension of this evolution is the continuous growth of the number of participants in the network, far beyond what the initial designers had in mind. While it does work today, it is widely believed that the current design of the global routing system cannot scale to accommodate future challenges. In 2006 an Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop was held to develop a shared understanding of the Internet routing system scalability issues faced by the large backbone operators. The participants documented in RFC 4984 their belief that "routing scalability is the most important problem facing the Internet today and must be solved." A potential solution to the routing scalability problem is ending the semantic overloading of Internet addresses, by separating node location from identity. Several proposals exist to apply this idea to current Internet addressing, among which the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) is the only one already being shipped in production routers. Separating locators from identifiers results in another level of indirection, and introduces a new problem: how to determine location, when the identity is known. The first part of our work analyzes existing proposals for systems that map identifiers to locators and proposes an alternative system, within the LISP ecosystem. We created a large-scale Internet topology simulator and used it to compare the performance of three mapping systems: LISP-DHT, LISP+ALT and the proposed LISP-TREE. We analyzed and contrasted their architectural properties as well. The monitoring projects that supplied Internet routing table growth data over a large timespan inspired us to create LISPmon, a monitoring platform aimed at collecting, storing and presenting data gathered from the LISP pilot network, early in the deployment of the LISP protocol. The project web site and collected data is publicly available and will assist researchers in studying the evolution of the LISP mapping system. We also document how the newly introduced LISP network elements fit into the current Internet, advantages and disadvantages of different deployment options, and how the proposed transition mechanism scenarios could affect the evolution of the global routing system. This work is currently available as an active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Draft. The second part looks at the problem of efficient one-to-many communications, assuming a routing system that implements the above mentioned locator/identifier split paradigm. We propose a network layer protocol for efficient live streaming. It is incrementally deployable, with changes required only in the same border routers that should be upgraded to support locator/identifier separation. Our proof-of-concept Linux kernel implementation shows the feasibility of the protocol, and our comparison to popular peer-to-peer live streaming systems indicates important savings in inter-domain traffic. We believe LISP has considerable potential of getting adopted, and an important aspect of this work is how it might contribute towards a better mapping system design, by showing the weaknesses of current favorites and proposing alternatives. The presented results are an important step forward in addressing the routing scalability problem described in RFC 4984, and improving the delivery of live streaming video over the Internet

Peer-to-peer television for the IP multimedia subsystem

Peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming has generated a significant amount of interest in both the research community and the industry, which find it a cost-effective solution to the user scalability problem. However, despite the success of Internet-based applications, the adoption has been limited for commercial services, such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). With the advent of the next-generation-networks (NGN) based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), advocating for an open and inter-operable architecture, P2P emerges as a possible alternative in situations where the traditional mechanisms are not possible or economically feasible. This work proposes a P2P IPTV architecture for an IMS-based NGN, called P2PTV, which allows one or more service providers to use a common P2P infrastructure for streaming the TV channels to their subscribers. Instead of using servers, we rely on the uploading capabilities of the user equipments, like set-top boxes, located at the customers’ premise. We comply with the existing IMS and IPTV standards from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Telecommunications and Internet converged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networking (TISPAN) bodies, where a centralized P2PTV application server (AS) manages the customer access to the service and the peer participation. Because watching TV is a complex and demanding user activity, we face two significant challenges. The first is to accommodate the mandatory IMS signaling, which reserves in the network the necessary QoS resources during every channel change, establishing a multimedia session between communicating peers. The second is represented by the streaming interruptions, or churn, when the uploading peer turns off or changes its current TV channel. To tackle these problems, we propose two enhancements. A fast signaling method, which uses inactive uploading sessions with reserved but unused QoS, to improve the tuning delay for new channel users. At every moment, the AS uses a feedback based algorithm to compute the number of necessary sessions that accommodates well the demand, while preventing the over-reservation of resources. We approach with special care mobility situations, where a proactive transfer of the multimedia session context using the IEEE 802.21 standard offers the best alternative to current methods. The second enhancement addresses the peer churn during channel changes. With every TV channel divided into a number of streams, we enable peers to download and upload streams different from their current channel, increasing the stability of their participation. Unlike similar work, we benefit from our estimation of the user demand and propose a decentralized method for a balanced assignment of peer bandwidth. We evaluate the performance of the P2PTV through modeling and large-scale computer simulations. A simpler experimental setting, with pure P2P streaming, indicates the improvements over the delay and peer churn. In more complex scenarios, especially with resource-poor peers having a limited upload capacity, we envision P2P as a complementary solution to traditional approaches like IP multicast. Reserving P2P for unpopular TV channels exploits the peer capacity and prevents the necessity of a large number of sparsely used multicast trees. Future work may refine the AS algorithms, address different experimental scenarios, and extend the lessons learned to non-IMS networks. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------La transmisión de vídeo con tecnologías peer-to-peer (P2P) ha generado un gran interés, tanto en la industria como en la comunidad científica, quienes han encontrado en dicha unión la solución para afrontar los problemas de escalabilidad de la transmisión de vídeo, reduciendo al mismo tiempo sus costes. A pesar del éxito de estos mecanismos en Internet, la transmisión de vídeo mediante técnicas P2P no se ha utilizado en servicios comerciales como puede ser el de televisión por IP (IPTV). Con la aparición de propuestas de redes de próxima generación basadas en el IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), que permite una arquitectura abierta e interoperable, los mecanismos basados en P2P emergen como posibles alternativas en situaciones donde los mecanismos tradicionales de transmisión de vídeo no se pueden desplegar o no son económicamente viables. Esta tesis propone una arquitectura de servicio de televisión peer-to-peer para una red de siguiente generación basada en IMS, que abreviaremos como P2PTV, que permite a uno o más proveedores de servicio utilizar una infraestructura P2P común para la transmisión de canales de TV a sus suscriptores. En vez de utilizar varios servidores, proponemos utilizar la capacidad de envío de los equipos de usuario, como los set-top boxes, localizados en el lado del cliente. En esta tesis extendemos los trabajos de estandarización sobre IMS IPTV de los organismos 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) y del Telecommunications and Internet converged Services and Protocols for Advanced Networking (TISPAN), donde un servidor de aplicación (AS) central de P2PTV administra el acceso de los clientes al servicio y permite compartir los recursos de los equipos. Debido a que el acceso a los canales de TV por parte de los usuarios es una actividad compleja, nos enfrentamos a dos retos importantes. El primero es administrar la señalización de IMS, con la cual se reservan los recursos de QoS necesarios durante cada cambio de canal, estableciendo una sesión multimedia entre los diferentes elementos de la comunicación. El segundo está representado por las interrupciones de la reproducción de video, causado por los equipos que sirven dicho vídeo cuando estos se desconectan del sistema o cuando cambian de canal. Para afrontar estos retos, proponemos dos mejoras al sistema. La primera mejora introduce el método de señalización rápida, en la cual se utilizan sesiones multimedia inactivas pero con recursos reservados para acelerar las conexiones entre usuarios. En cada momento, el AS utiliza la información extraída del algoritmo propuesto, que calcula el número de sesiones necesarias para administrar la demanda de conexiones, pero sin realizar una sobre-estimación, manteniendo bajo el uso de los recursos. Hemos abordado con especial cuidado la movilidad de los usuarios, donde se ha propuesto una transferencia de sesión pro-activa utilizando el estándar IEEE 802.21, el cual brinda una mejor alternativa que los métodos propuestos hasta la fecha. La segunda mejora se enfoca en las desconexiones de usuarios durante cambios de canal. Dividiendo los canales de TV en varios segmentos, permitimos a los equipos descargar o enviar diferentes partes de cualquier canal, aumentando la estabilidad de su participación. A diferencia de otros trabajos, nuestra propuesta se beneficia de la estimación de la demanda futura de los usuarios, proponiendo un método descentralizado para una asignación balanceada del ancho de banda de los equipos. Hemos evaluado el rendimiento del sistema P2PTV a través de modelado y de simulaciones de ordenador en sistemas IPTV de gran escala. Una configuración simple, con envío P2P puro, indica mejoras en el retardo y número de desconexiones de usuarios. En escenarios más complejos, especialmente con equipos con pocos recursos en la subida, sugerimos el uso de P2P como una solución complementaria a las soluciones tradicionales de multicast IP. Reservando el uso de P2P para los canales de TV poco populares, se permite explotar los recursos de los equipos y se previene la necesidad de un alto número de árboles multicast dispersos. Como trabajo futuro, se propone refinar los algoritmos del AS, abordar diferentes escenarios experimentales y también extender las lecciones aprendidas en esta tesis a otros sistemas no basados en IMS