Content Scheduling in Multimedia Interactive Mobile Games

In this paper, we study how to implement interactive multimedia services using a DVB-H broadcast channel combined with a point-to-point channel, such as 3G or GPRS. We study the problem in the context of a location-based interactive mobile game. The technical challenge is to schedule the sending of data over the broadcast channel while maintaining Quality-of-Service, that is, sending the right data to the right user at the right time to provide a seamless interactive experience. We explore design issues and problems related to the scheduling of content in the game, present a usecase study to describe scheduling problems and propose a content scheduling algorithm to solve these problems. Moreover, we provide a simulation of the system and the experimental results to show how different game parameters influence the in-time delivery of the multimedia content to the players. We conclude that most of the problems involved with our approach can be expressed as the problem of defining delivery deadlines for a scheduling algorithm

Hybrid cellular and broadcasting networks

Mobile multimedia broadcasting (i.e., delivering mass multimedia services to portable devices as cell phones or PDAs) is a fast emerging area with potential economic and societal impact. Digital broadcasting networks especially designed for mobile services are currently under deployment, DVB-H being the most representative technology in Europe with commercial services in several countries. On the other hand, MBMS extensions to the existing cellular networks are currently under standardization. Unfortunately, neither the broadcasting nor cellular systems alone can provide a cost effective service provision under all possible scenarios. Obviously, broadcasting over large areas makes sense only in scenarios with a lot of users consuming the same content, whereas cellular systems can deal much better with service personalization, but the existing infrastructure and currently allocated spectrum is too limited to hope for a mass market deployment. New systems based on interworking/integration of cellular and broadcasting networks are currently under investigation in an effort to provide affordable mass multimedia services. The goal of this approach is to join the advantages of both networks. The benefits shown in several publications are manifold, such as reducing the system cost, reducing the overall necessary data rate, improving the perceived area coverage (Sayadi et al. in Bell Labs Techn. J. 14(1):41–54, 2009), reducing the electromagnetic exposure, etc. This chapter covers RRM aspects for 3G MBMS services, coverage and capacity optimization aspects of DVB-H networks, as well as and network planning issues of hybrid cellular 3G and broadcasting DVB-H systems. The chapter is concluded with a brief overview of the second generation digital terrestrial TV standard DVB—Second Generation Terrestrial (DVB-T2)

A Systematic Mapping Study on Edge Computing and Analytics

The vast amount of data provided by the Internet of Things and sensors, have given rise to edge computing and analytics. In edge computing and analytics, data processing and analysis on sensor input is performed in edge devices prior to sending the results to the cloud. This reduces required processing in the cloud while minimizing communication network utilization and allows cloud resources to be used for other tasks such as decision making. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, unbiased overview of state-of-the-art research on edge computing and analytics. Of the 47 identified papers, several have targeted task scheduling and power optimisation, while data management and engineering, image and facial recognition as well as anomaly detection were not well studied. Simulation remains the most used approach for validation, and research results based on implementations of edge systems in real life environments are still sparse.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Unequal error protection for data partitioned H.264/AVC video broadcasting

Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) is becoming a popular addition to protocols for real-time video delivery over IP-based wireless networks. In particular, rateless codes are identified as suitable solution for AL-FEC due to their flexibility and capacity-approaching performance. Since each part of video data is not equally important for video reconstruction, it is beneficial to group it based on its importance, and then provide different degree of protection using Unequal Error Protection (UEP). Data partitioning (DP) is one such low-cost feature in H.264/AVC enabling partitioning of video data based on its importance. We propose schemes for the DP H.264/AVC video transmission using Raptor and Random Linear Codes (RLC) and investigate their performance as AL-FEC solutions in Digital Video Broadcasting. We provide comparisons between optimized Non-Overlapping Window RLC and Expanding Window (EW) RLC, which are two effective UEP RLC strategies. The results using realistic channel traces show viability of the EW RLC as a promising solution for multimedia broadcast applications