Real time video frames allocation in mobile networks using cooperative pre-fetching

In this paper, we study the bandwidth allocation problem for serving video requests in a mobile real-time video player system. One of the main issues to maintain the quality of services (QoS) in mobile video playback is to ensure sufficient number of video frames available at the client side while a video is being played. However, due to the limited bandwidth of a mobile network and variable workload streaming video, this is not easy to achieve in practice. In addition, the communication link between mobile clients and a video server is subject to frequent errors and temporary disconnection. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of buffered bandwidth in addition to the network bandwidth to support real-time playback of videos at mobile clients. Based on this, we designed a bandwidth allocation scheme called Cooperative Pre-Fetching (CP) in which the amount of bandwidth to be allocated to serve a video request depends on the current buffer level of the video at the client relative to the target buffer level of the client. In determining the target buffer level, we consider the errors in communication to the client as well as the other clients who are concurrently served by the system. The buffered video frames at the clients are then used to minimize the impact of error in communications on the overall QoS of video playbacks in the whole system.

On Using Real-Time Static Locking Protocols for Distributed Real-Time Databases

The use of Static Two Phase Locking Protocols (S2PL) for concurrency control in real-time database systems (RTDBS) has received little attention in the past. Actually, real-time S2PL (RT-S2PL) protocols do possess some desirable features making them suitable for RTDBS, especially for distributed real-time database systems (DRTDBS) in which remote locking is required and distributed deadlock is possible. In this paper, different RT-S2PL protocols are proposed. They differ in their methods of reducing the blocking time of higher priority transactions. Their performance is studied and compared with a real-time dynamic two phase locking protocol (RT-D2PL), called Hybrid Two Phase Locking (Hb2PL). The impact of different system and workload parameters, such as mean inter-arrival time of transactions, number of remote lock requests of a transaction, communication overhead for sending messages, and database size on their performance have been examined. The performance results indicate that the RT-S2PL protocols are suitable for DRTDBS in which the proportion of local locks of a transaction is small and the communication overhead for locking is high.     

Real-Time Access Control and Reservation on B-Tree Indexed Data

This paper proposes methodologiesto control the access of B⁺-tree-indexed datain a batch and firm real-time fashion. Algorithms are proposedto insert, query, delete, and rebalance B⁺-tree-indexeddata based on the non-real-time algorithms proposed in Kerttu,Eljas, and Tatu (1996) and the idea of priority inheritance (Sha,Rajkumar, and Lehoczky, 1990). We propose methodologies to reducethe number of disk I/O to improve the system performancewithout introducing more priority inversion. When the schedulabilityof requests with critical timing constraints is highly important,we propose a mechanism for data reservation based on the ideaof preemption level and the Stack Resource Policy (Baker, 1990).The performance of our methodologies was evaluated by a seriesof experiments, from which we have obtained encouraging results.     

A buffered-bandwidth approach for supporting real-time video streaming over cellular networks

In this paper, we study the admission and bandwidth allocation problems in real-time video streaming in a cellular network. Admission control in a cellular network is a complex issue due to the mobility of the clients, and the additional workload imposed by incoming clients could exceed the network capacity of a cell and seriously degrade the quality of services provided to the resident clients. To minimize the number of forced terminations of real-time video playback, we incorporate the notion of buffered bandwidth in the admission test for handoff client. Using this approach, we can balance the video workload among adjacent cells to minimize the impact of overloading as the result of handoff operations. We also examine techniques to maintain fairness in services especially under overload situations even though the requested videos from various types of clients could generate very different workload. Simulation experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach compared to widely used schemes.     

Maintaining data temporal consistency in distributed real-time systems

Previous works on maintaining temporal consistency of real-time data objects mainly focuses on real-time database systems in which the transmission delays (jitters) of update jobs are simply ignored. However, this assumption does not hold in distributed real-time systems where the jitters of the update jobs can be large and change unpredictably with time. In this paper, we examine the design problems when the More-Less (ML) approach (Xiong and Ramamritham in Proc. of the IEEE real-time systems symposium 1999; IEEE Trans Comput 53:567?C583, 2004), known to be an efficient scheme for maintaining temporal consistency of real-time data objects, is applied in a distributed real-time system environment. We propose two new extensions based on ML, called Jitter-based More-Less (JB-ML) and Statistical Jitter-based More-Less (SJB-ML) to address the jitter problems. JB-ML assumes that in the system the jitter is a constant for each update task, and it provides a deterministic guarantee in temporal consistency of the real-time data objects. SJB-ML further relaxes this restriction and provides a statistical guarantee based on the given QoS requirements of the real-time data objects. We demonstrate through extensive simulation experiments that both JB-ML and SJB-ML are effective approaches and they significantly outperform ML in terms of improving schedulability.     

A statistics-based sensor selection scheme for continuous probabilistic queries in sensor networks

A common approach to improve the reliability of query results based on error-prone sensors is to introduce redundant sensors. However, using multiple sensors to generate the value for a data item can be expensive, especially in wireless environments where continuous queries are executed. Moreover, some sensors may not be working properly and their readings need to be discarded. In this paper, we propose a statistical approach to decide which sensor nodes to be used to answer a query. In particular, we propose to solve the problem with the aid of continuous probabilistic query (CPQ), which is originally used to manage uncertain data and is associated with a probabilistic guarantee on the query result. Based on the historical data values from the sensor nodes, the query type, and the requirement on the query, we present methods to select an appropriate set of sensors and provide reliable answers for several common aggregate queries. Our statistics-based sensor node selection algorithm is demonstrated in a number of simulation experiments, which shows that a small number of sensor nodes can provide accurate and robust query results.     

DESH: overhead reduction algorithms for deferrable scheduling

Although the deferrable scheduling algorithm for fixed priority transactions (DS-FP) has been shown to be a very effective approach for minimizing real-time update transaction workload, it suffers from its on-line scheduling overhead. In this work, we propose two extensions of DS-FP to minimize the on-line scheduling overhead. The proposed algorithms produce a hyperperiod from DS-FP so that the schedule generated by repeating the hyperperiod infinitely satisfies the temporal validity constraint of the real-time data. The first algorithm, named DEferrable Scheduling with Hyperperiod by Schedule Construction (DESH-SC), searches the DS-FP schedule for a hyperperiod. The second algorithm, named DEferrable Scheduling with Hyperperiod by Schedule Adjustment (DESH-SA), adjusts the DS-FP schedule in an interval to form a hyperperiod. Our experimental results demonstrate that while both DESH-SC and DESH-SA can reduce the scheduling overhead of DS-FP, DESH-SA outperforms DESH-SC by accommodating significantly more update transactions in the system. Moreover, DESH-SA can also achieve near-optimal update workload.