Social telemedia: the relationship between social information and networked media

Social telemedia is a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media that allows users to capture and share live events collaboratively on mobile devices

Scalable playback rate control in P2P live streaming systems

Current commercial live video streaming systems are based either on a typical client–server (cloud) or on a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. The former architecture is preferred for stability and QoS, provided that the system is not stretched beyond its bandwidth capacity, while the latter is scalable with small bandwidth and management cost. In this paper, we propose a P2P live streaming architecture in which by adapting dynamically the playback rate we guarantee that peers receive the stream even in cases where the total upload bandwidth changes very abruptly. In order to achieve this we develop a scalable mechanism that by probing only a small subset of peers monitors dynamically the total available bandwidth resources and a playback rate control mechanism that dynamically adapts playback rate to the aforementioned resources. We model analytically the relationship between the playback rate and the available bandwidth resources by using difference equations and in this way we are able to apply a control theoretical approach. We also quantify monitoring inaccuracies and dynamic bandwidth changes and we calculate dynamically, as a function of these, the maximum playback rate for which the proposed system able to guarantee the uninterrupted and complete distribution of the stream. Finally, we evaluate the control strategy and the theoretical model in a packet level simulator of a complete P2P live streaming system that we designed in OPNET Modeler. Our evaluation results show the uninterrupted and complete stream delivery (every peer receives more than 99 % of video blocks in every scenario) even in very adverse bandwidth changes

STEER: Exploring the dynamic relationship between social information and networked media through experimentation

With the growing popularity of social networks, online video services and smart phones, the traditional content consumers are becoming the editors and broadcasters of their own stories. Within the EU FP7 project STEER, project partners have developed a novel system of new algorithms and toolsets that extract and analyse social informatics generated by social networks. Combined with advanced networking technologies, the platform creates services that offer more personalized and accurate content discovery and retrieval services. The STEER system has been deployed in multiple geographical locations during live social events such as the 2014 Winter Olympics. Our use case experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the underlying technologies

FORGE Toolkit: Leveraging Distributed Systems in eLearning Platforms

While more and more services become virtualised and always accessible in our society, laboratories supporting Computer Science (CS) lectures have mainly remained offline and class-based. This apparent abnormality is due to several limiting factors, discussed in the literature, such as the high cost of deploying and maintaining computer network testbeds and the lack of standardisation for the presentation of eLearning platforms. In this paper, we present the FORGE toolkit, which leverages experimentation facilities currently deployed in international initiatives for the development of e-learning materials. Thus, we solve the institutional challenge mentioned in the ACM/IEEE 2013 CS curricula concerning the access and maintenance of specialised and heterogeneous hardware thanks to a seamless integration with the networking testbed community. Moreover, this project builds an ecosystem where teaching and educational materials, tools and experiments are available under open scheme and policies. We demonstrate how it already meets most of the requirements from the Network and Communication component of CS 2013 and some of the labs of the Cisco academy. Finally, we present experience reports illustrating the potential benefits of this framework based on first deployments in four post-graduate courses in prestigious institutions around the world

On load balancing and resource allocation in cloud services

Abstract: Service providers must guarantee high quality of service (QoS) for each web application in a data center and simultaneously achieve optimal utilization of their infrastructure. Meeting the Service Level Objectives (SLOs), such as response time in a dynamic environment with a dense load and varying capacity, and simultaneously minimizing the energy consumption of the data center is an open research problem. This paper presents a control framework that addresses both problems of load balancing and resource allocation of consolidated web services in cloud computing infrastructure. The proposed approach aims at succeeding the customer requirements described in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) while maximizing server utilization. A hierarchical two-layer controller is established. The local (lower) level controllers determine the capacity and admitted workload of Virtual Machines (VMs), which correspond to a set of feasible operating points with performance guarantee. The global (upper) level decides the number and topology of active VMs that serve the total service demand and activates only the minimum number of servers. The cooperation of the two control layers ensures the system stability against the fluctuations of incoming requests and the system constraints

A Unified Framework for the Negotiation and Deployment of Network Services

Abstract. The Internet network technology today does not allow a sufficient degree of autonomy to express user choices, constraints and preferences in order to dynamically obtain the most suitable services. One of the goals of Autonomic Communication is to produce self-managing network elements able to provide the desired services in an automated way. In this context, we propose an architecture to automate user-provider and provider-provider relationships, by converting the Internet into an electronic market space where the commodities to be traded are network services. After an agreement has been reached via agent-based automated negotiation mechanisms, network elements must be automatically configured in order to enforce the agreed conditions. This is achieved by generating commands to programmable network elements via open interfaces. The ultimate goal is enable fully automatic installation, configuration and monitoring of protocols or service components involving multiple ownership domains, while taking into account the constraints and preferences of users and providers. 1

STEER: D2.2 STEER requirements and experimental environment architecture

STEER develops around the concept of innovative social and network-aware media distribution architecture that:*coordinates the effective sharing of media and networking resources among participating users, ensuring scalability, stability and network friendliness,*exploits features and capabilities of modern home gateways, such as caching and transcoding, to limit the cost of media distribution through resource sharing, dynamically adapting media exchanges to the capacity of the underlying networks, reducing service discontinuities and improving the overall Quality of Experience of the customer, and*makes the best usage of information about media object geographic location, social relationships and media object dynamics (e.g., popularity changes) to offer an efficient and personalized social-aware search and recommendation functionality.This document provides a detailed view of the STEER architecture, through the definition of its functional components, their purpose, mutual interactions and the applications that the project plans to develop with them.The document is organized as follows:*Section 1 delineates the structure of the document and the underlying rationale*Section 2 analyses the objectives that the STEER architectures tries to fulfil, expressed as system-level requirements affecting end users behaviour, user devices, home gateways, involved service providers, and STEER applications*Section 3 shows how STEER provides a way of organizing the wide range of raw information collected across various social media networks into a number of complementary, structured databases (or ‘graphs’) whose manipulation allows to achieve a deeper insight of the mutual relationships among user, events and data aggregates. This in turn sets the foundations for optimizing features such as recommendation, caching and media distribution.*Section 4 introduces a short but holistic view of the STEER architectural components and their main interactions*Section 5 describes the STEER components in more detail, explaining their purpose, their functionalities and the research objectives that motivate their usage, with relationship to the requirements set in Section 2.*Section 6 and Section 7 describe how specific STEER components are exploited to implement the STEER Augmented Live Broadcast and Storytelling applications, respectively, and the way they address the use cases described in Deliverable D2.1. The user interfaces for both applications has been defined in Deliverable D2.3