3,670 research outputs found
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
Online Influence Maximization in Non-Stationary Social Networks
Social networks have been popular platforms for information propagation. An
important use case is viral marketing: given a promotion budget, an advertiser
can choose some influential users as the seed set and provide them free or
discounted sample products; in this way, the advertiser hopes to increase the
popularity of the product in the users' friend circles by the world-of-mouth
effect, and thus maximizes the number of users that information of the
production can reach. There has been a body of literature studying the
influence maximization problem. Nevertheless, the existing studies mostly
investigate the problem on a one-off basis, assuming fixed known influence
probabilities among users, or the knowledge of the exact social network
topology. In practice, the social network topology and the influence
probabilities are typically unknown to the advertiser, which can be varying
over time, i.e., in cases of newly established, strengthened or weakened social
ties. In this paper, we focus on a dynamic non-stationary social network and
design a randomized algorithm, RSB, based on multi-armed bandit optimization,
to maximize influence propagation over time. The algorithm produces a sequence
of online decisions and calibrates its explore-exploit strategy utilizing
outcomes of previous decisions. It is rigorously proven to achieve an
upper-bounded regret in reward and applicable to large-scale social networks.
Practical effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated using both synthetic and
real-world datasets, which demonstrates that our algorithm outperforms previous
stationary methods under non-stationary conditions.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2016. Full versio
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
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