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

Evaluation of an awareness distribution mechanism: a simulation approach

In distributed software engineering, the role of informal communication is frequently overlooked. Participants simply employ their own ad-hoc methods of informal communication. Consequently such communication is haphazard, irregular, and rarely recorded as part of the project documentation. Thus, a need for tool support to facilitate more systematic informal communication via awareness has been identified. The tool proposed is based on the provision of awareness support that recognises the complete context of the evolution of software artefacts rather than single events. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking has been successfully employed to develop various distributed software engineering support tools. However, there are scalability problems inherent in naive P2P networks. To this end a semantic overlay network organisation algorithm has been developed and tested in simulation prior to deployment as part of a forthcoming awareness extension to the Eclipse environment. The simulation verified that the self-organisation algorithm was suitable for arranging a P2P network, but several unexpected behaviours were observed. These included wandering nodes, starved nodes, and local maxima. Each of these problems required modification of the original algorithm design to solve or ameliorate them

CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice

Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur

A FUNCTIONAL SKETCH FOR RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS FOR BUSINESS

This paper presents a functional design sketch for the resource management module of a highly scalable collaborative system. Small and medium enterprises require such tools in order to benefit from and develop innovative business ideas and technologies. As computing power is a modern increasing demand and no easy and cheap solutions are defined, especially small companies or emerging business projects abide a more accessible alternative. Our work targets to settle a model for how P2P architecture can be used as infrastructure for a collaborative system that delivers resource access services. We are focused on finding a workable collaborative strategy between peers so that the system offers a cheap, trustable and quality service. Thus, in this phase we are not concerned about solutions for a specific type of task to be executed by peers, but only considering CPU power as resource. This work concerns the resource management module as a part of a larger project in which we aim to build a collaborative system for businesses with important resource demandsresource management, p2p, open-systems, service oriented computing, collaborative systems

Application of JXTA-overlay platform for secure robot control

In this paper, we present the evaluation and experimental results of secured robot control in a P2P system. The control system is based on JXTA-Overlay platform. We used secure primitives and functions of JXTA-Overlay for the secure control of the robot motors. We investigated the time of robot control for some scenarios with different number of peers connected in JXTA-Overlay network. All experiments are realised in a LAN environment. The experimental results show that with the join of other peers in the network, the average time of robot control is increased, but the difference between the secure and unsecure robot control average time is nearly the samePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

DOH: A Content Delivery Peer-to-Peer Network

Many SMEs and non-pro¯t organizations su®er when their Web servers become unavailable due to °ash crowd e®ects when their web site becomes popular. One of the solutions to the °ash-crowd problem is to place the web site on a scalable CDN (Content Delivery Network) that replicates the content and distributes the load in order to improve its response time. In this paper, we present our approach to building a scalable Web Hosting environment as a CDN on top of a structured peer-to-peer system of collaborative web-servers integrated to share the load and to improve the overall system performance, scalability, availability and robustness. Unlike clusterbased solutions, it can run on heterogeneous hardware, over geographically dispersed areas. To validate and evaluate our approach, we have developed a system prototype called DOH (DKS Organized Hosting) that is a CDN implemented on top of the DKS (Distributed K-nary Search) structured P2P system with DHT (Distributed Hash table) functionality [9]. The prototype is implemented in Java, using the DKS middleware, the Jetty web-server, and a modi¯ed JavaFTP server. The proposed design of CDN has been evaluated by simulation and by evaluation experiments on the prototype

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor