Dynamic QoS queuing control mechanism for multimedia differentiated services

An essential goal of communication networks is to provide multimedia services with QoS streaming. A properly designed multimedia QoS system must reserve requested resources according to user QoS requirements and the available network resources. However, the static resource allocation among priority queues in DiffServ networks leads to insufficient resource usage when a burst occurs in one priority queue while other queues starve. This study presents a User-Oriented QoS Streaming System to achieve perceptible satisfaction based on novel streaming and media differentiation policies in DiffServ networks. This study also proposes that the Dynamic QoS Queue Mapping (DQ²M) mechanism dynamically control queue scheduling by adaptively maximizing the utilization of queues and network resources according to the soft states of the DiffServ network. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed DQ²M algorithm can improve the fairness and efficiency of resource utilization for low-priority queues.     

Dynamic overlay multicast for live multimedia streaming in urban VANETs

Infotainment service has been a foreseeing trend in VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks), and multimedia streaming has a high potential in VANET infotainment service. This paper considers the scenario of live multimedia streaming multicast to vehicles of the same group using a dynamic application layer overlay. Due to the willingness for cooperation of non-group nodes, application layer overlay multicast is more feasible than other kinds of multicast such as network-coding-based multicast and network-layer multicast. To adapt to high mobility and full of obstacles in urban VANETs, we propose an effective dynamic overlay multicast scheme for multimedia streaming, called OMV (Overlay Multicast in VANETs). The proposed OMV enhances an overlay’s stability with two strategies: (1) QoS-satisfied dynamic overlay and (2) mesh-structure overlay. The QoS-satisfied strategy to adjust the overlay selects potential new parents based on their streams’ packet loss rates and end-to-end delays. The mesh-structure strategy allows a child to have multiple parents. We evaluate the proposed OMV in urban VANETs with obstacles using two real video clips to demonstrate the feasibility of the OMV for real videos. Evaluation results show that comparing the proposed OMV to Qadri et al.’s work, which is a static mesh overlay and is the best method available in VANETs, the packet loss rate is reduced by 27.1% and the end-to-end delay is decreased by 11.7%, with a small control overhead of 2.1%, on average. Comparing the proposed OMV for tree overlays to ALMA, which is for dynamic tree multicast overlays and is also the best method available in MANETs, the packet loss rate is reduced by 7.1% and the end-to-end delay is decreased by 13.1%. In addition, to address the problem of obstacle-prone urban VANETs, we also derive feasible stream rates and overlay sizes for city maps with different road section sizes. To the best of our knowledge, how to organize and dynamically adjust an application layer multicast overlay for live multimedia streaming have not been studied in existing VANET literatures. In summary, to deal with highly dynamic topologies in urban VANETs, we propose a QoS-satisfied strategy for group nodes to switch to new parents that can offer better QoS. The proposed OMV is feasible for live multimedia streaming applications, such as emergency live video transmission and live video tour guides for passengers in different vehicles that belong to the same multicast group.     

Wireless resource management mechanism with green communication for multimedia streaming

In the face of massive parallel multimedia streaming and user access, multimedia servers are often in an overload state, resulting in the delay of service response and the low utilization of wireless resources, which makes it is difficult to satisfy the user experience quality. Aiming at the problems of low utilization rate of multimedia communication resources and large computing load of servers, this paper proposes a self management mechanism and architecture of wireless resources based on multimedia flow green communication. First, based on the combination of multimedia server, relay base station and user cluster, a multimedia green communication system architecture is built based on the comprehensive utilization rate of multimedia communication, and a cluster green communication control algorithm is proposed. Secondly, aiming at the dynamic service demand and asynchronous multimedia communication environment, aiming at ensuring the balance of resource allocation and accelerating the speed of resource allocation, we build a dynamic multimedia wireless resource architecture. Finally, the experimental results of statistics and analysis, from the server in different scale parallel multimedia streams under different scale delay, number of users relay network free resources proportion, user satisfaction, packet loss rate and other performance show that the proposed algorithm is effective and feasible.

     

Resilient overlay network for real-time interactive multimedia sessions in corporate networks

Real-time interactive multimedia communications are becoming increasingly useful for education, business, e-commerce and e-government, providing an enriched user experience in teleconferencing, e-meetings, distance training and product demonstrations. Large corporations are usually located at several sites, so real-time multipoint sessions within corporations are especially difficult. IP multicast is available or feasible within each site of an organization. Thus, corporate networks can be considered as various multicast-capable networks interconnected through a wide area network without multicast connectivity. This paper proposes a resilient self-managed overlay network to support real-time multipoint interactive sessions within corporate networks. The proposed overlay takes advantage of the configuration of corporate networks to self-organize and provide an efficient media delivery service, making use of multicast communications wherever available. Various self-healing techniques are implemented allowing for the continuity of ongoing sessions in spite of network disruptions and entity failures. Extensive simulations and tests have been carried out to assess the performance and resilience of the overlay facing several types of disruptions.     

Dynamic quota-based admission control with sub-rating in multimedia servers

An admission control algorithm for a multimedia server is responsible for determining if a new request can be accepted without violating the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the existing requests in the system. A novel quota-based admission control algorithm with sub-rating for two priority classes of requests is proposed in this study. The server capacity is divided into three partitions based on the quota values: one for each class of requests and one common pool shared by two classes of requests. Reward and penalty are adopted in the proposed system model. High-priority requests are associated with higher values of reward as well as penalty than low-priority ones. Given the characteristics of the system workload, the proposed algorithm finds the best partitions, optimizing the system performance based on the objective function of the total reward minus the total penalty. The sub-rating mechanism will reduce the QoS requirements of several low- priority clients, by cutting out a small fraction of the assigned server capacity, to accept a new high- priority client and to achieve a higher net earning value. A stochastic Petri-Net model is used to find the optimal quota values and two approximation approaches are developed to find sub-optimal settings. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than one without sub-rating mechanism, and that the sub-optimal solutions found by the proposed approximation approaches are very close to optimal ones. The approximation approaches enable the algorithm to dynamically adjust the quota values, based on the characteristics of the system workload, to achieve higher system performance.     

Dynamic routing and resource allocation in WDM transport networks

This contribution concentrates on dynamic routing in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. It is shown that a strategy based on pre-calculated alternatives and an adaptive dynamic path search performs very well over a wide load range. Moreover, specific effects for the impact of resource allocation strategies in photonic WDM networks are highlighted, especially the influence of wavelength converter usage strategies in networks with partial conversion. The paper also investigates the way non-Poisson traffic behaviour affects performance of routing strategies and presents how the results from dynamic routing investigation can help to optimise the network planning process.     

Enhancing P2P overlay network architecture for live multimedia streaming

The number of live multimedia streaming applications is increasing, explaining the use of many overlay network topologies. Application-layer multicast (ALM) that it is a feasible alternative to multimedia stream has attracted considerable attention. However, a serious problem of ALM is that the multicast tree may be fragile, and peer failure causes tree partitions. This work presents a novel Hierarchical Ring Tree (HRT) architecture for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) live multimedia streaming. The proposed architecture combines ring-based and tree-based structures in a robust, scalable, reliable and resilient structure that can be used practically as an ALM topology. When peers enter or leave the system, the topology can be recovered rapidly such that live multimedia stream can be delivered smoothly with a low latency. The proposed HRT topology is maintained efficiently without splitting or merging trees. The performance of the proposed architecture and algorithms is evaluated experimentally. Experimental results indicate that the proposed topology can be used in a high-churn P2P network with a small delay. Simulation and experiment results reveal that the proposed architecture has a lower overhead than the ZIGZAG approach when handling peers’ joining or leaving, exhibits faster recovery, better quality-of-service during streaming, and a more robust topology, even with an extremely high number of peers joining/leaving.     

超节点覆盖网中针对free-rider的用户评价机制

针对P2P超节点覆盖网中超节点的选择大都根据节点物理性能而没有考虑搭便车（free-rider）等现象,充分考虑节点间距离、交互情况和查询相似度等提出了一种用户评价机制,根据满意度选择超节点和查询请求的发送对象,不仅可以提高系统效率,同时可以达到减少和消除free-rider节点的目的。实验分析表明,P2P超节点覆盖网用该评价机制提高了文件查询成功率,减少了平均查询跳数,且降低了文件查询延时。     

Stability overlay for adaptive control laws

This paper proposes an architecture referred to as Stability Overlay (SO) for adaptive control of a class of nonlinear time-varying plants. The SO can be implemented in parallel with a wide range of “performance-based” adaptive control laws, i.e., adaptive control laws that seek to improve closed-loop performance, but may be susceptible to instability in the presence of unaccounted model uncertainty. In this architecture, the performance-based adaptive control law designates candidate controllers based on performance considerations, while the SO supervises this selection based upon online robust stability considerations. A particular selection of a performance-based adaptive control law is not specified. Rather, this selection can be from a wide range of adaptive control schemes. This paper provides stability proofs for the SO architecture and presents a simulation that illustrates the applicability of the proposed method.     

Routing and resource optimization in service overlay networks

Service Overlay Networks (SONs) create a virtual topology on top of the Internet and provide end-to-end quality of service guarantees without requiring support by the underlying network.The optimization of the resources utilized by an SON is a fundamental issue for an overlay operator owing to the costs involved and the need to satisfy user requirements. Careful decisions are necessary to provide enough capacity to overlay links, to route traffic, to assign users to access nodes and to deploy overlay nodes.In this paper, we propose two mathematical programming models for the user assignment problem, the traffic routing optimization and the dimensioning of the capacity reserved on overlay links in SONs. The first model minimizes the SON installation cost while providing full access to all users. The second model maximizes the SON profit by selecting which users to serve, based on the expected gain, and taking into consideration budget constraints of the SON operator. Moreover, we extend these models to include the optimization of the number and position of overlay nodes.We provide the optimal solutions of the proposed SON design formulations on a set of realistic-size instances and discuss the effect of different parameters on the characteristics of the planned networks. Numerical results show that the proposed approach is able to solve the problem to the optimum even for large-scale networks.     

Cost-effective resource provisioning for multimedia cloud-based e-health systems

Recently, multimedia cloud is being considered as a new effective serving mode in e-Health area that meets the requirement of scalable and economic multimedia service for e-health. It can provide a flexible stack of powerful Virtual Machine (VM) resources of cloud like CPU, memory, storage, network bandwidth etc. on demand to manage e-health media services and applications (e.g. medical image/video retrieval, health video transcoding, streaming, video rendering, sharing and delivery) at lower cost. However, one major issue here is how to efficiently allocate VM resources dynamically based on e-health applications’ QoS demands and support energy and cost savings by optimizing the number of servers in use. In order to solve this problem, we propose a cost effective and dynamic VM allocation model based on Nash bargaining solution. With extensive simulations it is shown that the proposed mechanism can reduce the overall cost of running servers while at the same time guarantee QoS demand and maximize resource utilization in various dimensions of server resources.     

云计算环境下动态资源碎片管理机制

针对云计算环境下用户所需资源与服务资源规格不完全相符以及在资源预留过程中完整资源被切割而产生的资源碎片问题,提出一种云环境下考虑碎片资源重利用的动态资源管理策略。研究了云计算环境下资源碎片的形成原因,构建了碎片资源池,制定了任务对碎片资源接收的度量标准,在充分考虑当前任务对资源查找、调度、匹配的同时,进一步讨论了任务调度对资源的分割情况,进而指出资源碎片对后续任务接收能力的影响,搭建了云计算环境下动态资源碎片调度模型。理论分析和Cloudsim仿真实验证明,该资源管理策略能有效实现碎片资源的优化重组,提高了资源对后续任务的接收能力,与此同时保证了较高的资源利用率。     

基于神经网络的多媒体通信控制机制研究

在Internet网络的多媒体通信系统中需要解决QoS控制问题,如视频、音频等多媒体数据的同步、网络拥塞控制、多媒体数据传输的QoS协商控制、视频平滑,以及连续多媒体系统的CPU调度等.为了解决好这些控制问题,提出一种基于神经网络的多媒体通信控制机制,把人工智能与多媒体通信技术紧密结合起来,并在Internet网络环境下开发了实用的多媒体通信系统.运行结果表明,该系统效果优越.     

An efficient resource allocation scheme for multimedia applications in MANET

A Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) is collection of mobile nodes and communicates using wireless network without having any fixed infrastructure. This paper proposes an algorithm used to allocate the resources for multimedia applications using mobile agent technology in MANET. In addition to that, it allocates the resources for hand-off applications and new applications.     

A fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks

Wireless networks are expected to support real-time interactive multimedia traffic and must be able, therefore, to provide their users with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Although the QoS provisioning problem arises in wireline networks as well, mobility of hosts and scarcity of bandwidth makes QoS provisioning a challenging task in wireless networks. It has been noticed that multimedia applications can tolerate and gracefully adapt to transient fluctuations in the QoS that they receive from the network. The additional flexibility afforded by the ability of multimedia applications to tolerate and adapt to transient changes in QoS can be exploited by protocol designers to significantly improve the overall performance of wireless systems. This paper presents a fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks that uses a combination of bandwidth reservation and bandwidth borrowing to provide network users with QoS in terms of guaranteed bandwidth, call blocking, and call dropping probabilities. Our view of fairness was inspired by the well-known max-min fairness allocation protocol for wireline networks. Simulation results are presented that compare our protocol to similar schemes.     

无线网络中多媒体传输拥塞控制机制的研究

TFRC是一种专门针对多媒体流在Internet中传输的拥塞控制方案。在有线网络如Internet中,TFRC效率很高,然而在无线网络中．TFRC的发送速率会因传输造成的比特错误而急剧下降？因此,如何在无线网络中改善TFRC的拥塞控制机制便成了当前需要解决的一个前沿课题：介绍了针对这一问题的两种解决方案——ZBS和TFRC Veno,并且通过仿真分析,指出ZBS和TFRC Veno在无线网络中都能获得比TFRC更高的吞吐率,而在有线网络中TFRC Veno则表现出比ZBS更好的TCP友好特性。因此．TFRC Veno是针对该问题的更为有效的解决方案：     

Extending next generation network (NGN) architecture for connection-oriented transport

Next Generation Network (NGN) is the architecture of the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T in short) supporting the provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS)-guaranteed services over different packet transport technologies. Such capability derives from the effectiveness of a dynamic resource control performed by the Resource Admission Control Function (RACF) at service set-up.Control Plane (CP)-enabled connection-oriented transport networks can guarantee the QoS support for new bandwidth-greedy NGN services across the optical transport segment thanks to the ability of automatic path set-up and traffic segregation. But the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for the CP in transport networks, i.e., the Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is not yet included within the NGN supported transport technologies.In this work, we outline architectural guidelines and design strategies for ITU-T RACF employment across GMPLS-controlled networks while providing a viable solution for dynamic resource control that takes into account operational issues for the integration of GMPLS capabilities within NGN architecture (i.e., supported interfaces, actual node capabilities).An NGN prototype implementing the proposed architectural enhancement is also presented as a proof of concept. The prototype highlights how the extended ITU-T NGN can set-up Multimedia over IP (MoIP) services using GMPLS-controlled transport objects.     

Symbolic quality control for multimedia applications

We present a fine grain quality control method for multimedia applications. The method takes as input an application software composed of actions. The execution times of actions are unknown increasing functions of quality level parameters. The method allows the construction of a Controller which computes adequate action schedules and corresponding quality levels, so as to meet QoS requirements for a given platform. These include requirements for safety (action deadlines are met) as well optimality (maximization and smoothness of quality levels). The Controller consists of a Quality Manager and a Scheduler. For each action, the Controller uses a quality management policy for choosing a schedule and quality levels meeting the QoS requirements. The schedule is selected amongst a set of optimal schedules computed by the Scheduler. We extend and improve results of previous papers providing a solid theoretical basis for designing and implementing the Controller. We propose a symbolic quality management method using speed diagrams, a representation of the controlled system’s dynamics. Instead of numerically computing a quality level for each action, the Quality Manager changes action quality levels based on the knowledge of constraints characterizing control relaxation regions. These are sets of states in which quality management for a given number of computation steps can be relaxed without degrading quality. We study techniques for efficient computation of optimal schedules. We present experimental results including the implementation of the method and benchmarks for an MPEG4 video encoder. The benchmarks show drastic performance improvement for controlled quality with respect to constant quality. They also show that symbolic quality management allows significant reduction of the overhead with respect to numeric quality management. Finally, using optimal schedules can lead to considerable performance gains.     

Dynamic resource allocation for exploitation and exploration with ambidexterity: Logical mechanism and simulations

Strategy and organizational theorists have emphasized the importance of balancing exploitation and exploration for organizations’ sustainable success in regards to organizational learning and adaptation. However, few researchers have addressed the mechanisms or criteria in regards to an organization’s resource allocation for exploitation and exploration with an ambidextrous balance, although previous researchers agree that exploitation and exploration are important for organizational success and that a balance between the two should be achieved in order to obtain sustainable competitiveness. The main purpose of this research is to make a logical argument on how team creativity evolves from the creativity revelation processes through knowledge creation by balancing exploitation and exploration. Specifically, this research presents a new logical mechanism to allocate a team’s limited resources to exploitation and exploration, keeping a balance between the two activities. We prove the validity of the proposed logical mechanism by conducting longitudinal simulations.     

Dynamic scheduling model of computing resource based on MAS cooperation mechanism

Allocation of grid resources aims at improving resource utility and grid application performance. Currently, the algorithms proposed for this purpose do not fit well the autonomic, dynamic, distributive and heterogeneous features of the grid environment. According to MAS (multi-agent system) cooperation mechanism and market bidding game rules, a model of allocating allocation of grid resources based on market economy is introduced to reveal the relationship between supply and demand. This model can make good use of the studying and negotiating ability of consumers’ agent and takes full consideration of the consumer’s behavior, thus rendering the application and allocation of resource of the consumers rational and valid. In the meantime, the utility function of consumer is given; the existence and the uniqueness of Nash equilibrium point in the resource allocation game and the Nash equilibrium solution are discussed. A dynamic game algorithm of allocating grid resources is designed. Experimental results demonstrate that this algorithm diminishes effectively the unnecessary latency, improves significantly the smoothness of response time, the ratio of throughput and resource utility, thus rendering the supply and demand of the whole grid resource reasonable and the overall grid load balanceable. Supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant No. 06JJ2033), and the Society Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant No. 07YBB239)