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

Characterizing and Improving the Reliability of Broadband Internet Access

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband Internet access with multihoming.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 6 table

Experimentation and Characterization of Mobile Broadband Networks

The Internet has brought substantial changes to our life as the main tool to access a large variety of services and applications. Internet distributed nature and technological improvements lead to new challenges for researchers, service providers, and network administrators. Internet traffic measurement and analysis is one of the most trivial and powerful tools to study such a complex environment from different aspects. Mobile BroadBand (MBB) networks have become one of the main means to access the Internet. MBB networks are evolving at a rapid pace with technology enhancements that promise drastic improvements in capacity, connectivity, and coverage, i.e., better performance in general. Open experimentation with operational MBB networks in the wild is currently a fundamental requirement of the research community in its endeavor to address the need for innovative solutions for mobile communications. There is a strong need for objective data relating to stability and performance of MBB (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, and soon-to-come 5G) networks and for tools that rigorously and scientifically assess their performance. Thus, measuring end user performance in such an environment is a challenge that calls for large-scale measurements and profound analysis of the collected data. The intertwining of technologies, protocols, and setups makes it even more complicated to design scientifically sound and robust measurement campaigns. In such a complex scenario, the randomness of the wireless access channel coupled with the often unknown operator configurations makes this scenario even more challenging. In this thesis, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform: an open access and flexible hardware-based platform for measurements on operational MBB networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic, and meaningful assessment of the performance and reliability of MBB networks. We detail the challenges we overcame while building and testing the MONROE testbed and argue our design and implementation choices accordingly. Measurements are designed to stress performance of MBB networks at different network layers by proposing scalable experiments and methodologies. We study: (i) Network layer performance, characterizing and possibly estimating the download speed offered by commercial MBB networks; (ii) End users’ Quality of Experience (QoE), specifically targeting the web performance of HTTP1.1/TLS and HTTP2 on various popular web sites; (iii) Implication of roaming in Europe, understanding the roaming ecosystem in Europe after the "Roam like Home" initiative; and (iv) A novel adaptive scheduler family with deadline is proposed for multihomed devices that only require a very coarse knowledge of the wireless bandwidth. Our results comprise different contributions in the scope of each research topic. To put it in a nutshell, we pinpoint the impact of different network configurations that further complicate the picture and hopefully contribute to the debate about performance assessment in MBB networks. The MBB users web performance shows that HTTP1.1/TLS is very similar to HTTP2 in our large-scale measurements. Furthermore, we observe that roaming is well supported for the monitored operators and the operators using the same approach for routing roaming traffic. The proposed adaptive schedulers for content upload in multihomed devices are evaluated in both numerical simulations and real mobile nodes. Simulation results show that the adaptive solutions can effectively leverage the fundamental tradeoff between the upload cost and completion time, despite unpredictable variations in available bandwidth of wireless interfaces. Experiments in the real mobile nodes provided by the MONROE platform confirm the findings

QoE de streaming de vídeo em redes veiculares com multihoming

With the ever-increasing interest and availability of vehicular networks, it is important to study the Quality-of-Experience provided by these networks, which ultimately determines the general public perception and thus the overall user adoption. The broad Internet access, the evolution of user equipment, such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers, and the appearance of services like Youtube and Netflix, is leading the user content consumption to be more and more in the form of video streaming. Either motivated by safety or commercial applications, video streaming in such highly mobile environments offers multiple challenges. This dissertation evaluates the QoE of a multihoming communication strategy, supported simultaneously byWAVE and Wi-Fi, for increasing the reliability and performance of video streams in these environments. Furthermore, it also investigates how distinct network functionalities, such as multihoming load balance, buffering, and network metrics such as throughput and latency affect the overall QoE observed. The results obtained led to the proposal of a multihoming load balance policy for video applications based on access technologies, aiming to improve QoE. The overall results show that QoE improves by 7.5% using the proposed approach.Com o aumento contínuo do interesse e disponibilidade de redes veiculares, é importante agora estudar a Qualidade de Experiência fornecida por estas redes, que fundamentalmente determina a opinião e a percepção do público geral sobre um dado serviço. O vasto acesso à Internet, a evolução dos equipamentos, como os telemóveis atuais, tablets e computadores pessoais, e o aparecimento de serviços como o YouTube e o Netflix, está a fazer com que o conteúdo mais consumido seja cada vez mais em forma de streaming de vídeo. Quer seja motivado por aplicações de segurança ou comerciais, o streaming de vídeo em ambientes altamente móveis levanta vários desafios. Esta dissertação avalia a Qualidade de Experiência de técnicas de multihoming, permitindo o uso de diferentes tecnologias de comunicação, como o WAVE e o Wi-Fi, para aumentar a fiabilidade e desempenho de streams de vídeo nestes ambientes. Para além disso, investiga também como é que diferentes mecanismos de rede, como o balanceamento, multihoming e o buffering, e métricas como a taxa de transferência e latência, afetam a QoE observada. Os resultados obtidos levaram à proposta de uma política de divisão de tráfego para aplicações de vídeo baseada em tecnologias de acesso para situações de multihoming, visando uma melhoria da QoE do utilizador. Utilizando o método proposto, os resultados mostram que a experiência do utilizador tem uma melhoria de 7,5%.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Mobile-IP ad-hoc network MPLS-based with QoS support.

The support for Quality of Service (QoS) is the main focus of this thesis. Major issues and challenges for Mobile-IP Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) to support QoS in a multi-layer manner are considered discussed and investigated through simulation setups. Different parameters contributing to the subjective measures of QoS have been considered and consequently, appropriate testbeds were formed to measure these parameters and compare them to other schemes to check for superiority. These parameters are: Maximum Round-Trip Delay (MRTD), Minimum Bandwidth Guaranteed (MBG), Bit Error Rate (BER), Packet Loss Ratio (PER), End-To-End Delay (ETED), and Packet Drop Ratio (PDR) to name a few. For network simulations, NS-II (Network Simulator Version II) and OPNET simulation software systems were used.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .A355. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1444. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Cooperative resource pooling in multihomed mobile networks

The ubiquity of multihoming amongst mobile devices presents a unique opportunity for users to co-operate, sharing their available Internet connectivity, forming multihomed mobile networks on demand. This model provides users with vast potential to increase the quality of service they receive. Despite this, such mobile networks are typically underutilized and overly restrictive, as additional Internet connectivity options are predominantly ignored and selected gateways are both immutable and incapable of meeting the demand of the mobile network. This presents a number of research challenges, as users look to maximize their quality of experience, while balancing both the financial cost and power consumption associated with utilizing a diverse set of heterogeneous Internet connectivity options. In this thesis we present a novel architecture for mobile networks, the contribution of which is threefold. Firstly, we ensure the available Internet connectivity is appropriately advertised, building a routing overlay which allows mobile devices to access any available network resource. Secondly, we leverage the benefits of multipath communications, providing the mobile device with increased throughput, additional resilience and seamless mobility. Finally, we provide a multihomed framework, enabling policy driven network resource management and path selection on a per application basis. Policy driven resource management provides a rich and descriptive approach, allowing the context of the network and the device to be taken into account when making routing decisions at the edge of the Internet. The aim of this framework, is to provide an efficient and flexible approach to the allocation of applications to the optimal network resource, no matter where it resides in a mobile network. Furthermore, we investigate the benefits of path selection, facilitating the policy framework to choose the optimal network resource for specific applications. Through our evaluation, we prove that our approach to advertising Internet connectivity in a mobile network is both efficient and capable of increasing the utilization of the available network capacity. We then demonstrate that our policy driven approach to resource management and path selection can further improve the user’s quality of experience, by tailoring network resource usage to meet their specific needs

Mobility as a first class function

Seamless host mobility has been a desirable feature for a long time, but was not part of the original design of the Internet architecture or protocols. Current approaches to network-layer mobility typically require additional network-layer entities for mobility management, which add complexity to the current engineering landscape of the Internet. We present a host-based, end-to-end architecture for host mobility using the Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP). ILNP provides mobility support as a first class function, since mobility management is controlled and managed by the end-systems, and does not require additional network-layer entities. We demonstrate an instance of ILNP that is a superset of IPv6 – called ILNPv6 – that is implemented by extending the current IPv6 code in the Linux kernel. We make a direct comparison of performance of ILNPv6 and Mobile IPv6, showing the improved performance of ILNPv6.Postprin

Performance Evaluation of TCP Multihoming for IPV6 Anycast Networks and Proxy Placement

In this thesis, the impact of multihomed clients and multihomed proxy servers on the performance of modern networks is investigated. The network model used in our investigation integrates three main components: the new one-to-any Anycast communication paradigm that facilitates server replication, the next generation Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) that offers larger address space for packet switched networks, and the emerging multihoming trend of connecting devices and smart phones to more than one Internet service provider thereby acquiring more than one IP address. The design of a previously proposed Proxy IP Anycast service is modified to integrate user device multihoming and Ipv6 routing. The impact of user device multihoming (single-homed, dual-homed, and triple-homed) on network performance is extensively analyzed using realistic network topologies and different traffic scenarios of client-server TCP flows. Network throughput, packet latency delay and packet loss rate are the three performance metrics used in our analysis. Performance comparisons between the Anycast Proxy service and the native IP Anycast protocol are presented. The number of Anycast proxy servers and their placement are studied. Five placement methods have been implemented and evaluated including random placement, highest traffic placement, highest number of active interface placements, K-DS placement and a new hybrid placement method. The work presented in this thesis provides new insight into the performance of some new emerging communication paradigms and how to improve their design. Although the work has been limited to investigating Anycast proxy servers, the results can be beneficial and applicable to other types of overlay proxy services such as multicast proxies