vSkyConf: Cloud-assisted Multi-party Mobile Video Conferencing

As an important application in the busy world today, mobile video conferencing facilitates virtual face-to-face communication with friends, families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A fully decentralized, optimal algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths, such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with optimal stream distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast solutions.Comment: 10 page

Efficient computations on meshes with express links

At head of title: Computer science publication.Cover title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 10-12).published_or_final_versio

Joint Design of Source-Channel Codes with Linear Source Encoding Complexity and Good Channel Thresholds Based on Double-Protograph LDPC Codes

We propose the use of a lower or upper triangular sub-base matrix to replace the identity matrix in the source-check-channel-variable linking protomatrix of a double-protograph low-density parity-check joint-source-channel code (DP-LDPC JSCC). The elements along the diagonal of the proposed lower or upper triangular sub-base matrix are assigned as "1" and the other non-zero elements can take any non-negative integral values. Compared with the traditional DP-LDPC JSCC designs, the new designs show a theoretical channel threshold improvement of up to 0.41 dB and a simulated source symbol error rate improvement of up to 0.5 dB at an error rate of 1e-6.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, to appear in IEEE Communications Letter