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

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

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

Towards video streaming in IoT environments: vehicular communication perspective

Multimedia oriented Internet of Things (IoT) enables pervasive and real-time communication of video, audio and image data among devices in an immediate surroundings. Today's vehicles have the capability of supporting real time multimedia acquisition. Vehicles with high illuminating infrared cameras and customized sensors can communicate with other on-road devices using dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and 5G enabled communication technologies. Real time incidence of both urban and highway vehicular traffic environment can be captured and transmitted using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication modes. Video streaming in vehicular IoT (VSV-IoT) environments is in growing stage with several challenges that need to be addressed ranging from limited resources in IoT devices, intermittent connection in vehicular networks, heterogeneous devices, dynamism and scalability in video encoding, bandwidth underutilization in video delivery, and attaining application-precise quality of service in video streaming. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive review on video streaming in IoT environments focusing on vehicular communication perspective. Specifically, significance of video streaming in vehicular IoT environments is highlighted focusing on integration of vehicular communication with 5G enabled IoT technologies, and smart city oriented application areas for VSV-IoT. A taxonomy is presented for the classification of related literature on video streaming in vehicular network environments. Following the taxonomy, critical review of literature is performed focusing on major functional model, strengths and weaknesses. Metrics for video streaming in vehicular IoT environments are derived and comparatively analyzed in terms of their usage and evaluation capabilities. Open research challenges in VSV-IoT are identified as future directions of research in the area. The survey would benefit both IoT and vehicle industry practitioners and researchers, in terms of augmenting understanding of vehicular video streaming and its IoT related trends and issues

De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Network reputation-based quality optimization of video delivery in heterogeneous wireless environments

The mass-market adoption of high-end mobile devices and increasing amount of video traffic has led the mobile operators to adopt various solutions to help them cope with the explosion of mobile broadband data traffic, while ensuring high Quality of Service (QoS) levels to their services. Deploying small-cell base stations within the existing macro-cellular networks and offloading traffic from the large macro-cells to the small cells is seen as a promising solution to increase capacity and improve network performance at low cost. Parallel use of diverse technologies is also employed. The result is a heterogeneous network environment (HetNets), part of the next generation network deployments. In this context, this thesis makes a step forward towards the “Always Best Experience” paradigm, which considers mobile users seamlessly roaming in the HetNets environment. Supporting ubiquitous connectivity and enabling very good quality of rich mobile services anywhere and anytime is highly challenging, mostly due to the heterogeneity of the selection criteria, such as: application requirements (e.g., voice, video, data, etc.); different device types and with various capabilities (e.g., smartphones, netbooks, laptops, etc.); multiple overlapping networks using diverse technologies (e.g., Wireless Local Area Networks (IEEE 802.11), Cellular Networks Long Term Evolution (LTE), etc.) and different user preferences. In fact, the mobile users are facing a complex decision when they need to dynamically select the best value network to connect to in order to get the “Always Best Experience”. This thesis presents three major contributions to solve the problem described above: 1) The Location-based Network Prediction mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks (LNP) provides a shortlist of best available networks to the mobile user based on his location, history record and routing plan; 2) Reputation-oriented Access Network Selection mechanism (RANS) selects the best reputation network from the available networks for the mobile user based on the best trade-off between QoS, energy consumptions and monetary cost. The network reputation is defined based on previous user-network interaction, and consequent user experience with the network. 3) Network Reputation-based Quality Optimization of Video Delivery in heterogeneous networks (NRQOVD) makes use of a reputation mechanism to enhance the video content quality via multipath delivery or delivery adaptation

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

QoE-Centric Control and Management of Multimedia Services in Software Defined and Virtualized Networks

Multimedia services consumption has increased tremendously since the deployment of 4G/LTE networks. Mobile video services (e.g., YouTube and Mobile TV) on smart devices are expected to continue to grow with the emergence and evolution of future networks such as 5G. The end user’s demand for services with better quality from service providers has triggered a trend towards Quality of Experience (QoE) - centric network management through efficient utilization of network resources. However, existing network technologies are either unable to adapt to diverse changing network conditions or limited in available resources. This has posed challenges to service providers for provisioning of QoE-centric multimedia services. New networking solutions such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can provide better solutions in terms of QoE control and management of multimedia services in emerging and future networks. The features of SDN, such as adaptability, programmability and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications such as live video streaming, 3D/HD video and video gaming. However, the delivery of multimedia services over SDN/NFV networks to achieve optimized QoE, and the overall QoE-centric network resource management remain an open question especially in the advent development of future softwarized networks. The work in this thesis intends to investigate, design and develop novel approaches for QoE-centric control and management of multimedia services (with a focus on video streaming services) over software defined and virtualized networks. First, a video quality management scheme based on the traffic intensity under Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP (DASH) using SDN is developed. The proposed scheme can mitigate virtual port queue congestion which may cause buffering or stalling events during video streaming, thus, reducing the video quality. A QoE-driven resource allocation mechanism is designed and developed for improving the end user’s QoE for video streaming services. The aim of this approach is to find the best combination of network node functions that can provide an optimized QoE level to end-users through network node cooperation. Furthermore, a novel QoE-centric management scheme is proposed and developed, which utilizes Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Segment Routing (SR) to enhance QoE for video streaming services over SDN/NFV-based networks. The goal of this strategy is to enable service providers to route network traffic through multiple disjointed bandwidth-satisfying paths and meet specific service QoE guarantees to the end-users. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed schemes in this work improve the video quality significantly compared with the state-of-the- art approaches. The thesis further proposes the path protections and link failure-free MPTCP/SR-based architecture that increases survivability, resilience, availability and robustness of future networks. The proposed path protection and dynamic link recovery scheme achieves a minimum time to recover from a failed link and avoids link congestion in softwarized networks