Error resilient video over multimedia broadcast multicast services (MBMS)

With available data rates for mobile devices constantly increasing, services such as video broadcast and multicast are becoming feasible. A new standard called Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) is being developed by 3GPP to enable new class of spectrum-efficient multimedia services. Multicast services are expected to serve a diverse user base with varying connectivity and capabilities. We analyze the problem of video error resilience in MBMS services that is critical to maintain consistent quality for end users. The existing error resilience techniques for IP multicasting are not applicable in the MBMS environment. In this paper, we present error resilience techniques that are applicable within the context of the MBMS standard. We propose an Intra Block Refresh method for MBMS services and the results show improved performance. We develop a methodology that can be applied to adapting traditional error resilience tools for the MBMS environment.     

Error resilient video over multimedia broadcast multicast services (MBMS)

With available data rates for mobile devices constantly increasing, services such as video broadcast and multicast are becoming feasible. A new standard called Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) is being developed by 3GPP to enable new class of spectrum-efficient multimedia services. Multicast services are expected to serve a diverse user base with varying connectivity and capabilities. We analyze the problem of video error resilience in MBMS services that is critical to maintain consistent quality for end users. The existing error resilience techniques for IP multicasting are not applicable in the MBMS environment. In this paper, we present error resilience techniques that are applicable within the context of the MBMS standard. We propose an Intra Block Refresh method for MBMS services and the results show improved performance. We develop a methodology that can be applied to adapting traditional error resilience tools for the MBMS environment.     

Radio resource management in emerging heterogeneous wireless networks

Deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks is spreading throughout the world as users want to be connected anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Meanwhile, these users are increasingly interested in multimedia applications such as video streaming and Voice over IP (VoIP), which require strict Quality of Service (QoS) support. Provisioning network resources with such constraints is a challenging task. In fact, considering the availability of various access technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, or cellular networks), it is difficult for a network operator to find reliable criteria to select the best network that ensures user satisfaction while maximizing network utilization. Designing an efficient Radio Resource Management (RRM), in this type of environment, is mandatory for solving such problems. In order to provide a better understanding of RRM’s design, this paper presents a detailed investigation of key challenges that constitute an efficient RRM framework. More importantly, an overview with a classification of recent solutions, in terms of decision making, is provided along with the discussion.     

Scheduling security-critical multimedia applications in heterogeneous networks

Security is becoming an increasingly important issue in the design of multimedia applications, which are widely used in the industry and academic organizations. However, existing scheduling schemes for real-time multimedia service in heterogeneous networks generally do not take into account security requirements when making allocation and control decisions. In this paper, we develop and evaluate a security-critical multimedia scheduling scheme in the framework of heterogeneous networks. At first, we construct a general media distortion model according to the observed parameters in each network, as well as each application’s characteristic. After that, we exploit a scalable graph-based authentication method which achieves a good trade-off between flexibility and efficiency. Furthermore, a security-critical scheduling scheme is proposed by taking into account applications’ timing and security requirements in addition to precedence constraints. The proposed scheme is applied to heuristically find resource allocations, which maximize the quality of security and the probability of meeting deadlines for all the multimedia applications running on heterogeneous networks. Extensive simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed scheme.     

Adaptive end-to-end QoS for multimedia over heterogeneous wireless networks

There has been a surge of interest for multimedia applications over wireless networks in recent years. A colossal number of ways have been proposed to decrease delay, delay jitter and loss in wireless networks and good user-perceived quality in video over internet. This paper studies the multimedia over heterogeneous wireless networks, requirements and problems, and proposes a new scheme to overcome the obstacles. The proposed scheme, takes into account the effects of Application-Level Wireless Multilevel ECN marking (AWMECN), thus helps us overcome the congestion/loss mistake problems. For handoff, handover and lossy link problems, it is considered that a freezing mechanism is in use in application layer and assumed that the upper layers can be aware of disconnection periods to make the rate adaptation decisions. Also a new scheme has been added to receiver to gracefully degrade the quality when no other action is available to combat the long delays without data which is caused by handoffs and wireless temporary disconnections. The transport layer mechanism is chosen to be UDP for avoiding TCP regarding problems. We believe that obtaining a good quality of video depends on good performance of all layers and tried to use the best mechanism in each layer.     

Design and implementation of enhanced IEEE 802.15.4 for supporting multimedia service in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, there has been a growing demand to incorporate multimedia content delivery over the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This feature could not only enhance several existing applications in the commercial, industrial, and medical domains, but could also spur an array of new applications. However, the efficient gathering of still images, audio, and video information in WSNs imposes stringent requirements on the throughput and energy consumption. Most wireless communication standards with high or moderate data throughputs do not focus primarily on energy efficiency. The IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN standard provides a widely accepted solution for low-cost and low-power wireless communication, with a potential to cater to many types of application scenarios. IEEE 802.15.4 MAC includes features such as its dual operational modes (Non-Beacon-enabled mode/Beacon-enabled mode), which make this standard more attractive for providing multimedia services over the networked sensors. Its Beacon-enabled mode can conserve energy by using the RF sleep mechanism, but it is limited by the lower data throughput. On the other hand, the Non-Beacon-enabled mode can offer higher data throughput but at the expense of significant energy consumption, mainly due to the idle listening problem. In order to overcome these issues, we propose an enhancement to IEEE 802.15.4, named TEA-15.4, which adaptively adjusts the active period based on traffic information. To detect data traffic in the network, the proposed scheme utilizes two techniques: Arbitrary Traffic Signal (ATS) and Traffic Time-Out (TTO). By utilizing these two techniques, the proposed TEA-15.4 can not only support enough data throughput to carry out multimedia communications, but also offer lower energy consumption for the sensing device in WSNs. For performance evaluations, we implement our proposed scheme and the IEEE 802.15.4 full-standard on the TinyOS. Based on the results gathered from testbed experiments and the TOSSIM simulator, TEA-15.4 is shown to be a suitable mechanism for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs).     

Qos-driven SCTP-based multimedia delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks

Stream Control Transport Protocol （SCTP）-based handover is supposedly the best suit for current mobile Internet users. However, prevalent SCTP-based handover solutions mostly evaluate candidate networks by a function of multiple attributes such as available bandwidth, delay, etc., which tend to vary often in burst and might cause the instability of handover decisions. Moreover, the SCTP congestion control strategy leads to sudden degradation of users＇ quality of experience for multimedia streaming service because of abrupt and frequent strong fluctuations in the transmission rate. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS-driven SCTP- based handover solution （SCTP-QD） appropriate for heterogeneous wireless multimedia transmission. A new network service and transport layer QoS-aware model is designed to help SCTP-QD accurately analyze the service stability and data transmission capacity for each path. A proper QoS-driven handover decision model is introduced in SCTP-QD in order to improve the SCTP handover efficiency while reducing unnecessary handoffs and fail-over probability. A proposal is finally addressed to help SCTP-QD avoid the slow start phase whenever handover occurs. The simulation results show that SCTP-QD outperforms existing solutions in terms of data delivery performance.     

Explicit synchronisation of heterogeneous dynamics networks via three-layer communication framework

This paper addresses the explicit synchronisation of heterogeneous dynamics networks via three-layer communication framework. The main contribution is to propose an explicit synchronisation algorithm, in which the synchronisation errors of all the agents are decoupled. By constructing a three-layer node model, the proposed algorithm removes the assumptions that the topology is fixed and the synchronisation process is coupled. By introducing appropriate assumptions, the algorithm leads to a class of explicit synchronisation protocols based on the states of agents in different layers. It is proved in the sense of Lyapunov that, if the dwell time is larger than a threshold, the explicit synchronisation can be achieved for closed-loop heterogeneous dynamics networks under switching topologies. The results are further extended to the cases in which the switching topologies are only frequently but not always connected. Simulation results are presented with four single-link manipulators to verify the theoretical analysis.     

An adaptive framework for 3D graphics over networks

Access to and transmission of 3D models over networks becomes increasingly popular. However, the performance and quality of access to remote 3D models strongly depends on system load conditions and the capabilities of the various system components, such as clients, servers, and interconnect. The network graphics framework (NGF) integrates various transmission methods for downloading 3D models in a client–server environment. The NGF automatically selects the optimal transmission method for a given pair of client and server, taking into account characteristics of the model to be transmitted, critical environment conditions, user preferences and the capabilities of the client and the server. The NGF aims to provide constant quality of service across different clients and under varying environment conditions.     

A congestion-aware search protocol for heterogeneous peer-to-peer networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is the hottest, fastest growing application on the Internet. When designing Gnutella-like applications, the most important consideration is the scalability problem, because P2P systems typically support millions of users online concurrently. Gnutella suffers from poor scaling due to its flooding-based search, resulting in excessive amounts of repeated query messages. Therefore, a good search protocol plays an important role in a system’s scalability. However, congestion, due to large query loads from users, definitely impacts on the performance of search protocols, and this consideration has received little attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a congestion-aware search protocol for unstructured P2P networks. Our protocol consists of three parts—Congestion-Aware Forwarding, Random Early Stop and Emergency Signaling. The aim of our protocol is to integrate congestion control and object discovery functionality so that the search protocol can achieve good performance under congested networks and flash crowds. We perform extensive simulations to study our proposed protocol. The results show that our protocol can significantly reduce the hit delay while maintaining the high hit rate and also the congestion problems such as query loss and the peer overloading problem can be effectively alleviated.     

An enhanced MSU-TSCH scheduling algorithms for industrial wireless sensor networks

The reliability and latency requirements of wireless sensor network-based smart grid communications are met in large part by MAC protocols. Developed by IEEE, time slotted channel hopping (TSCH), a method that is effective, dependable, and predictable. However, the TSCH standard does not enable mobility and does not offer any solution for scheduling, especially in IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH, the most recent generation of extremely dependable and low-power MAC protocols. Recently, MSU-TSCH a time-frequency communication schedule was proposed to provide mobility to TSCH. Despite its distinctive qualities, MSU-TSCH has the drawback of computing the TSCH schedule at each node independently of its traffic load, which can significantly increase the communication delay. Due to this limitation, MSU-TSCH is not suitable for some delay-sensitive smart grid applications. In this article, we provide an improved MSU-TSCH-based TSCH protocol, called Mobility-TSCH, that dynamically adjusts time slot assignments based on traffic volume and latency requirement. Moreover, the protocol Mobility-TSCH adapts to topology changes and supports mobility. Additionally, it optimizes time slot allocation by prioritizing nodes closest to the sink. The performance and evaluation analysis of Mobility-TSCH compared to the original MSU-TSCH, reveal that the communication delay is greatly reduced, decreases the average end-to-end latency, the high packet delivery ratio (PDR), Increase the performance of both metrics, parent connectivity ratio (PCR) and convergence time (CT), while maintaining a minimal overhead signaling.     

A MIH-based approach for best network selection in heterogeneous wireless networks

In the next generation wireless networks, different technologies belonging to one or more operators should be integrated to form a heterogeneous environment based on an IP core network infrastructure. This ensures user mobility and service continuity by maintaining connections when switching between various technologies and it introduces new resources and possibilities for applications. In this context, an automatic interface selection based on instantaneous and practical constraints and user preferences (Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, available resources, security, power consumption, etc.) is therefore required. The different network selection and handover schemes proposed in the literature can be classified into three approaches according to who is responsible for making the handover decision: the terminal, the network or by a cooperation between both of them. However, these approaches keep presenting some drawbacks; namely the problem of resources management and network load balancing whenever the selection is controlled by the mobile terminal (MT) and the problem of scalability and unknown operator's management policy whenever the selection is rather controlled by the network.In this article, first we propose a MIH based approach for handover initiation and preparation for heterogeneous wireless network. The proposed framework is based on the principals of IEEE 802.21 for context information gathering and optimized handover decision making. Second, we propose a new architecture and new network selection scheme that explicitly take into account the current resource usage and the user preferences. Furthermore, our solution ensures the selection of the most suitable network for each flow while taking into consideration its expectations in terms of QoS. A feasibility study of implementing a new architecture on a single MT is evaluated by using typical scenarios and using various algorithms. Thanks to the introduced function entities and modules in the proposed architecture, network utilization balancing and user and application expectations, which are successfully assured without operator intervention. Performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm best meets the common quality requirements.     

An exact end-to-end blocking probability algorithm for multicast networks

We consider the calculation of blocking probabilities in multicast trees with dynamic membership. We extend the work by Karvo et al., where an approximate algorithm based on the reduced load approximation (RLA) was given to calculate end-to-end blocking for infinite sized user populations in multicast networks. The new algorithm for calculating end-to-end call blocking exactly for an arbitrary sized user population is based on the known blocking probability algorithm in hierarchical multiservice access networks, where link occupancy distributions are alternately convolved and truncated. We show that the algorithm can be applied to multicast trees embedded in a network with an arbitrary topology carrying also non-multicast traffic. The resource sharing of multicast connections, however, requires the modification of the algorithm by introducing a new type of convolution, the OR-convolution. In addition, we discuss several different user population models for which the algorithm is applicable.     

Protocols for mobility management in heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks

Substantial works have recently been reported on the mobility management in single-hop wireless networks (e.g. cellular networks and WLAN hotspots), while there has been an increased interest in multi-hop communications. This has made mobility management in heterogeneous multi-hop wireless networks (HMWNs) really interesting so that both single-hop and multi-hop communication paradigms can be integrated. One of the main research challenges for 4G wireless systems is the identification of a mobility management technique that could integrate different wireless technologies such as WLANs, WMANs and WWANs, operating in infrastructure (single-hop) and infrastructureless (ad hoc or multi-hop) modes. In this article we envision a futuristic HMWN where heterogeneous networks, operating in single-hop and multi-hop modes are integrated to provide increased capacity and enhanced coverage for the users. We summarize various existing mobility management solutions and discuss why these schemes are not adequate for HMWNs, as well as highlighting our view of mobility management issues in HMWNs.     

An interference-aware fair scheduling for multicast in wireless mesh networks

Multicast is a fundamental routing service in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) due to its many potential applications such as video conferencing, online games, and webcast. Recently, researchers proposed using link-quality-based routing metrics for finding high-throughput paths for multicast routing. However, the performance of such link-quality-based multicast routing is still limited by severe unfairness. Two major artifacts that exist in WMNs are fading which leads to low quality links, and interference which leads to unfair channel allocation in the 802.11 MAC protocol. These artifacts cause the multicast application to behave unfairly with respect to the performance achieved by the multicast receivers.     

Secure lightweight password authenticated key exchange for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Several three-party password authenticated key exchange (3-PAKE) protocols have recently been proposed for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSN). These are efficient and designed to address security concerns in ad-hoc sensor network applications for a global Internet of Things framework, where a user may request access to sensitive information collected by resource-constrained sensors in clusters managed by gateway nodes. In this paper we first analyze three recently proposed 3-PAKE protocols and discuss their vulnerabilities. Then, based on Radio Frequency Identification technologies we propose a novel 3-PAKE protocol for HWSN applications, with two extensions for additional security features, that is provably secure, efficient and flexible.     

A QoS-based dynamic pricing approach for services provisioning in heterogeneous wireless access networks

In this paper we propose a simple QoS-based dynamic pricing approach for services provisioning in a heterogeneous wireless access network environment which attempts to increase user’s satisfaction level by firstly, maximizing the provided QoS level, and secondly, by applying dynamic pricing strategies according to the QoS. These strategies will allow service providers to maximize their profits. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed dynamic pricing approach benefits both users and wireless service providers (WSPs). Results also suggest that users have better overall satisfaction due to a better QoS level and fairer prices. The analysis shows that our proposed pricing approach contributes to an increase in WSPs profits compared to the application of the flat-rate pricing model in a competitive market-model.     

一种异构无线网络的垂直切换方案

针对异构网络环境下的垂直切换决策问题,提出了一种使用IEEE802.21 MIH标准进行数据传输的改进TOPSIS切换决策方案。引进了联系数和IEEE802.21 MIH的概念,基于[a+bi]型联系数提出了一种新的权重确定方法以及模糊属性指标表示方法,据此对传统的TOPSIS决策算法进行了改进。基于IEEE802.21 MIH标准对切换过程和数据结构进行了分析和构建。用具体实例对算法的正确性进行了验证并与以往的算法进行了比较分析,结果证明,该算法与以往算法相比更加合理、准确。