No Arabic abstract
Fixed infrastructured networks naturally support centralized approaches for group management and information provisioning. Contrary to infrastructured networks, in multi-hop ad-hoc networks each node acts as a router as well as sender and receiver. Some applications, however, requires hierarchical arrangements that-for practical reasons-has to be done locally and self-organized. An additional challenge is to deal with mobility that causes permanent network partitioning and re-organizations. Technically, these problems can be tackled by providing additional uplinks to a backbone network, which can be used to access resources in the Internet as well as to inter-link multiple ad-hoc network partitions, creating a hybrid wireless network. In this paper, we present a prototypically implemented hybrid wireless network system optimized for multimedia content distribution. To efficiently manage the ad-hoc communicating devices a weighted clustering algorithm is introduced. The proposed localized algorithm deals with mobility, but does not require geographical information or distances.
Multimedia streaming to mobile devices is challenging for two reasons. First, the way content is delivered to a client must ensure that the user does not experience a long initial playback delay or a distorted playback in the middle of a streaming session. Second, multimedia streaming applications are among the most energy hungry applications in smartphones. The energy consumption mostly depends on the delivery techniques and on the power management techniques of wireless access technologies (Wi-Fi, 3G, and 4G). In order to provide insights on what kind of streaming techniques exist, how they work on different mobile platforms, their efforts in providing smooth quality of experience, and their impact on energy consumption of mobile phones, we did a large set of active measurements with several smartphones having both Wi-Fi and cellular network access. Our analysis reveals five different techniques to deliver the content to the video players. The selection of a technique depends on the mobile platform, device, player, quality, and service. The results from our traffic and power measurements allow us to conclude that none of the identified techniques is optimal because they take none of the following facts into account: access technology used, user behavior, and user preferences concerning data waste. We point out the technique with optimal playback buffer configuration, which provides the most attractive trade-offs in particular situations.
In this paper, we propose a systematic solution to the problem of cross-layer optimization for delay-sensitive media transmission over time-varying wireless channels as well as investigate the structures and properties of this solution, such that it can be easily implemented in various multimedia systems and applications. Specifically, we formulate this problem as a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) by explicitly considering the users heterogeneous multimedia traffic characteristics (e.g. delay deadlines, distortion impacts and dependencies etc.), time-varying network conditions as well as, importantly, their ability to adapt their cross-layer transmission strategies in response to these dynamics. Based on the heterogeneous characteristics of the media packets, we are able to express the transmission priorities between packets as a new type of directed acyclic graph (DAG). This DAG provides the necessary structure for determining the optimal cross-layer actions in each time slot: the root packet in the DAG will always be selected for transmission since it has the highest positive marginal utility; and the complexity of the proposed cross-layer solution is demonstrated to linearly increase w.r.t. the number of disconnected packet pairs in the DAG and exponentially increase w.r.t. the number of packets on which the current packets depend on. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art cross-layer solutions. Moreover, we show that our solution provides the upper bound performance for the cross-layer optimization solutions with delayed feedback such as the well-known RaDiO framework.
In this paper, we propose a systematic solution to the problem of scheduling delay-sensitive media data for transmission over time-varying wireless channels. We first formulate the dynamic scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) that explicitly considers the users heterogeneous multimedia data characteristics (e.g. delay deadlines, distortion impacts and dependencies etc.) and time-varying channel conditions, which are not simultaneously considered in state-of-the-art packet scheduling algorithms. This formulation allows us to perform foresighted decisions to schedule multiple data units for transmission at each time in order to optimize the long-term utilities of the multimedia applications. The heterogeneity of the media data enables us to express the transmission priorities between the different data units as a priority graph, which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This priority graph provides us with an elegant structure to decompose the multi-data unit foresighted decision at each time into multiple single-data unit foresighted decisions which can be performed sequentially, from the high priority data units to the low priority data units, thereby significantly reducing the computation complexity. When the statistical knowledge of the multimedia data characteristics and channel conditions is unknown a priori, we develop a low-complexity online learning algorithm to update the value functions which capture the impact of the current decision on the future utility. The simulation results show that the proposed solution significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art scheduling solutions.
In this work, we propose a content caching and delivery strategy to maximize throughput capacity in cache-enabled wireless networks. To this end, efficient betweenness (EB), which indicates the ratio of content delivery paths passing through a node, is first defined to capture the impact of content caching and delivery on network traffic load distribution. Aided by EB, throughput capacity is shown to be upper bounded by the minimal ratio of successful delivery probability (SDP) to EB among all nodes. Through effectively matching nodes EB with their SDP, the proposed strategy improves throughput capacity with low computation complexity. Simulation results show that the gap between the proposed strategy and the optimal one (obtained through exhausted search) is kept smaller than 6%.
Online social networking techniques and large-scale multimedia systems are developing rapidly, which not only has brought great convenience to our daily life, but generated, collected, and stored large-scale multimedia data. This trend has put forward higher requirements and greater challenges on massive multimedia data retrieval. In this paper, we investigate the problem of image similarity measurement which is used to lots of applications. At first we propose the definition of similarity measurement of images and the related notions. Based on it we present a novel basic method of similarity measurement named SMIN. To improve the performance of calculation, we propose a novel indexing structure called SMI Temp Index (SMII for short). Besides, we establish an index of potential similar visual words off-line to solve to problem that the index cannot be reused. Experimental evaluations on two real image datasets demonstrate that our solution outperforms state-of-the-art method.