Trends in consumer communications: Networked homes [Guest Editorial]

A major theme in the consumer communications area has been networked homes. In the past this has often focused on networking consumer devices within a single home to offer added value or better control. Initially, these solutions were often closed and only worked with devices of a single manufacturer. Subsequently, this interworking has been extended to include equipment from different sources. With the increasing number of solutions available, and the increasing demand for sharing audio and video, the demands on the home network have grown substantially. Another focus of increased activity is extending the sharing of devices and services within a single home to across many homes. These two themes are covered by the two articles in this current issue of the Consumer Communications and Networking Series

Streaming Video over HTTP with Consistent Quality

In conventional HTTP-based adaptive streaming (HAS), a video source is encoded at multiple levels of constant bitrate representations, and a client makes its representation selections according to the measured network bandwidth. While greatly simplifying adaptation to the varying network conditions, this strategy is not the best for optimizing the video quality experienced by end users. Quality fluctuation can be reduced if the natural variability of video content is taken into consideration. In this work, we study the design of a client rate adaptation algorithm to yield consistent video quality. We assume that clients have visibility into incoming video within a finite horizon. We also take advantage of the client-side video buffer, by using it as a breathing room for not only network bandwidth variability, but also video bitrate variability. The challenge, however, lies in how to balance these two variabilities to yield consistent video quality without risking a buffer underrun. We propose an optimization solution that uses an online algorithm to adapt the video bitrate step-by-step, while applying dynamic programming at each step. We incorporate our solution into PANDA -- a practical rate adaptation algorithm designed for HAS deployment at scale.Comment: Refined version submitted to ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), 201

Trends in consumer communications (Series Editorial)

The last 15 years have heralded many developments and advances in consumer communications, from early developments of device-specific challenges in interoperability and configuration that are well captured by the concept of plug and play to a more recent emphasis on mobility and service personalization. The one constant technical challenge, and to a great extent a business success, is home networking in its many forms. There is not a modern home without some variant of a set-top box. The three articles in this issue provide a good overview of current and topical requirements in consumer communications

From capturing to rendering : volumetric media delivery with six degrees of freedom

Technological improvements are rapidly advancing holographic-type content distribution. Significant research efforts have been made to meet the low latency and high bandwidth requirements set forward by interactive applications such as remote surgery and virtual reality. Recent research made six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for immersive media possible, where users may both move their head and change their position within a scene. In this article, we present the status and challenges of 6DoF applications based on volumetric media, focusing on the key aspects required to deliver such services. Furthermore, we present results from a subjective study to highlight relevant directions for future research

Enhancing the Multimedia Experience in Emerging Networks

As multimedia processing and networking technologies, products and services evolve, the number of users communicating, collaborating and entertaining over the IP networks is growing rapidly. With the emergence of pervasive and ubiquitous multimedia services, this proliferation creates an abundant increase in the amount of the Internet backbone traffic. This brings the problem of efficient transmission of real-time and time-sensitive media content to the fore. Effective multimedia services demand appropriate application-specific and media-aware solutions, without which the full benefits of such services will not be realized. Poor approaches often lead to system performance degradations such as unacceptable presentation quality perceived by the users, possible network collapses due to the high-bandwidth nature of the multimedia applications, and poor performance observed by other data-oriented applications due to the unresponsiveness of multimedia flows. From a networking perspective, traditional approaches consider the application data as "sacred" and do not differentiate any part of it from the rest. While this keeps the data-delivery mechanisms, namely, the transport-layer protocols, as plain as possible, it also precludes these mechanisms from interpreting the media content and tailoring their actions according to the importance of the content. Given that this naive approach cannot satisfy the specific needs of each and every one of the today's emerging applications ranging from videotelephony to video-on-demand, from distance education to telemedicine, from remote surveillance to online video gaming, the study of Multimedia Transport Protocols (MMTP) is overdue. An MMTP solution basically integrates the multimedia content information into the responsible data-delivery mechanisms along with the requirements of the invoking application and network characteristics to deliver the highest level of service quality. In other words, an MMTP solution offers a unified environment where all cooperating protocol components interact with each other and make the best use of this collaboration to fulfill their respective duties. The focus of this thesis is on the design and evaluation of a set of end-to-end and system-level MMTP solutions for scalable, reliable, and high quality multimedia services in ever-changing, complex and heterogeneous computing and communication environments.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Altunbasak, Yucel; Committee Member: AlRegib, Ghassan; Committee Member: Ergun, Ozlem; Committee Member: Juang, Biing Hwang (Fred); Committee Member: Mersereau, Russell M