Bandwidth Adaptation Algorithms for Adaptive Multimedia Services in Mobile Cellular Networks

The fluctuation of available link bandwidth in mobilecellular networks motivates the study of adaptive multimediaservices, where the bandwidth of an ongoing multimedia call can bedynamically adjusted. We analyze the diverse objectives of theadaptive multimedia framework and propose two bandwidth adaptationalgorithms (BAAs) that can satisfy these objectives. The firstalgorithm, BAA-RA, takes into consideration revenue and``anti-adaptation' where anti-adaptation means that a user feelsuncomfortable whenever the bandwidth of the user's call ischanged. This algorithm achieves near-optimal total revenue withmuch less complexity compared to an optimal BAA. The secondalgorithm, BAA-RF, considers revenue and fairness, and aims at themaximum revenue generation while satisfying the fairnessconstraint defined herein. Comprehensive simulation experimentsshow that the difference of the total revenue of BAA-RA and thatof an optimal BAA is negligible. Also, numerical results revealthat there is a conflicting relationship between anti-adaptationand fairness.     

Disk placement for arbitrary-rate playback in an interactive video server

Multimedia data, especially continuous media including video and audio objects, represent a rich and natural stimulus for humans, but require large amount of storage capacity and real-time processing. In this paper, we describe how to organize video data efficiently on multiple disks in order to support arbitrary-rate playback requested by different users independently. Our approach is to segment and decluster video objects and to place the segments in multiple disks using a restricted round-robin scheme, called prime round-robin (PRR). Its placement scheme provides uniform load balance of disks for arbitrary retrieval rate as well as normal playback, since it eliminates hot spots. Moreover, it does not require any additional disk bandwidth to support VCR-like operations such as fast-forward and rewind. We have studied the various effects of placement and retrieval schemes in a storage server by simulation. The results show that PRR offers even disk accesses, and the failure in reading segment by deadline occurs only at the beginning of new operations. In addition, the number of users admitted is not decreased, regardless of arbitrary-rate playback requests.     

Understanding interference and carrier sensing in wireless mesh networks [Accepted from Open Call]

Wireless mesh networks aim to provide high-speed Internet service without costly network infrastructure deployment and maintenance. The main obstacle in achieving high-capacity wireless mesh networks is interference between the mesh links. In this article, we analyze the carrier sensing and interference relations between two wireless links and measure the impact of these relations on link capacity on an indoor 802.11a mesh network testbed. We show that asymmetric carrier sensing and/or interference relations commonly exist in wireless mesh networks, and we study their impact on the link capacity and fair-channel access. In addition, we investigate the effect of traffic rate on link capacity in the presence of interference.     

Design and Analysis of Optimal Multi-Level Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Networks

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) is an enhanced version of Mobile IPv6 designed to reduce signaling overhead and to support seamless handoff in IP-based wireless/mobile networks. To support more scalable services, HMIPv6 networks can be organized as the form of a multi-level hierarchy architecture (i.e., tree structure). However, since multi-level HMIPv6 networks incur additional packet processing overhead at multiple mobility agents, it is important to find the optimal hierarchy level to minimize the total cost, which consists of the location update cost and the packet delivery cost. In this paper, we investigate this problem, namely the design of an optimal multi-level HMIPv6 (OM-HMIPv6) network. To accomplish this, we design a function to represent the location update cost and the packet delivery cost in multi-level HMIPv6 networks. Based on these formulated cost functions, we calculate the optimal hierarchy level in multi-level HMIPv6 networks, in order to minimize the total cost. In addition, we investigate the effects of the session-to-mobility ratio (SMR) on the total cost and the optimal hierarchy. The numerical results, which show various relationships among the network size, optimal hierarchy, and SMR, can be utilized to design an optimal HMIPv6 network. In addition, the analytical results are validated by comprehensive simulations. Sangheon Pack received his B.S. (2000, magna cum laude) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees from Seoul National University, both in computer engineering. He is a post doctor fellow in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Seoul National University, Korea. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM. During 2002–2005, he was a recipient of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS) Computer Science and Information Technology Scholarship. He has been also a member of Samsung Frontier Membership (SFM) from 1999. He received a student travel grant award for the IFIP Personal Wireless Conference (PWC) 2003. He was a visiting researcher to Fraunhofer FOKUS, German in 2003. His research interests include mobility management, wireless multimedia transmission, and QoS provision issues in the next-generation wireless/mobile networks. Yanghee Choi received B.S. in electronics engineering from Seoul National University, M.S. in electrical engineering from Korea advanced Institute of Science, and Doctor of Engineering in Computer Science from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST) in Paris, in 1975, 1977 and 1984 respectively. Before joining the School of Computer Engineering, Seoul National University in 1991, he has been with Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) during 1977–1991, where he served as director of Data Communication Section, and Protocol Engineering Center. He was research student at Centre National d'Etude des Telecommunications (CNET), Issy-les-Moulineaux, during 1981–1984. He was also Visiting Scientist to IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for the year 1988–1989. He is now leading the Multimedia Communications Laboratory in Seoul National University. He is also director of Computer Network Research Center in Institute of Computer Technology (ICT). He was editor-in-chief of Korea Information Science Society journals. He was chairman of the Special Interest Group on Information Networking. He has been associate dean of research affairs at Seoul National University. He was president of Open Systems and Internet Association of Korea. His research interest lies in the field of multimedia systems and high-speed networking. Minji Nam received her B.S. and M.S degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University in 2003 and 2005, respectively. From 2005, she has worked on Portable Internet Development Team for Korea Telecom. Her research interests are mobile networks, portable internet technology (IEEE 802.16) and Mobile IPv6.     

Temporal fairness guarantee in multi-rate wireless LANs for per-flow protection

Wireless LAN technologies such as IEEE 802.11a and 802.11b support high bandwidth and multi-rate data transmission to match the channel condition (i.e., signal to noise ratio). While some wireless packet fair queuing algorithms to achieve the per-flow throughput fairness have been proposed, they are not appropriate for guaranteeing QoS in multi-rate wireless LAN environments. We propose a wireless packet scheduling algorithm that uses the multi-state (multi-rate) wireless channel model and performs packet scheduling by taking into account the channel usage time of each flow. The proposed algorithm aims at per-flow protection by providing equal channel usage time for each flow. To achieve the per-flow protection, we propose a temporally fair scheduling algorithm called Contention-Aware Temporally fair Scheduling (CATS) which provides equal channel usage time for each flow. Channel usage time is defined as the sum of the packet transmission time and the contention overhead time due to the CSMA/CA mechanism. The CATS algorithm provides per-flow protection in wireless LAN environments where the channel qualities of mobile stations are dynamic over time, and where the packet sizes are application-dependent. We also extend CATS to Decentralized-CATS (D-CATS) to provide per-flow protection in the uplink transmission. Using an NS-2 simulation, we evaluate the fairness property of both CATS and D-CATS in various scenarios. Simulation results show that the throughput of mobile stations with stable link conditions is not degraded by the mobility (or link instability) of other stations or by packet size variations. D-CATS also shows less delay and less delay jitter than FIFO. In addition, since D-CATS can coordinate the number of contending mobile stations, the overall throughput is not degraded as the number of mobile stations increases. This work was supported in part by the Brain Korea 21 project of Ministry of Education and in part by the National Research Laboratory project of Ministry of Science and Technology, 2004, Korea.     

A mobility-based load control scheme in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 networks

By introducing a mobility anchor point (MAP), Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) reduces the signaling overhead and handoff latency associated with Mobile IPv6. In this paper, we propose a mobility-based load control (MLC) scheme, which mitigates the burden of the MAP in fully distributed and adaptive manners. The MLC scheme combines two algorithms: a threshold-based admission control algorithm and a session-to-mobility ratio (SMR)-based replacement algorithm. The threshold-based admission control algorithm gives higher priority to ongoing mobile nodes (MNs) than new MNs, by blocking new MNs when the number of MNs being serviced by the MAP is greater than a predetermined threshold. On the other hand, the SMR-based replacement algorithm achieves efficient MAP load distribution by considering MNs’ traffic and mobility patterns. We analyze the MLC scheme using the continuous time Markov chain in terms of the new MN blocking probability, ongoing MN dropping probability, and binding update cost. Also, the MAP processing latency is evaluated based on the M/G/1 queueing model. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the MLC scheme outperforms other schemes and thus it is a viable solution for scalable HMIPv6 networks.     

IIPP: integrated IP paging protocol with a power save mechanism

The advent of advanced mobile/wireless systems has been facilitating the battery‐powered mobile computing devices (nodes) to remain always connected to the internet. However, until now, the power‐drain rate of mobile nodes is very high in comparison with the available power of portable batteries. To reduce the energy consumption of mobile nodes, we present an integrated IP paging protocol (IIPP) by integrating the IP‐layer paging protocol based on Mobile IPv4 regional registration (MIPRR) with a power save mechanism. IIPP reduces the frequency of signaling messages between mobile nodes and networks. When not sending or receiving data for a certain time, mobile nodes enter power save mode (PSM), and consume very low power. We formulate analytical models and carry out simulations to evaluate the proposed IIPP. The results show that, compared to MIPRR, IIPP significantly reduces the average power consumption of the mobile node and signaling overheads in the network. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A target-centric surveillance system based on localization and social networking

Surveillance systems are developed to enhance security and safety by constantly observing locations of interest. Although those systems can observe scenes of individual cameras separately, it is difficult to figure out what happened to the target moving across multiple cameras. This paper first proposes Video Diary Service (VDS) to solve this problem. VDS is an automatic video-oriented diary service, which keeps track of users’ lives. In addition, VDS can identify social networking relationships among the users, as well as record videos of the users. By exploiting these properties of VDS, we extend VDS into a new surveillance system called S-VDS. S-VDS is a target-centric surveillance system which focuses on the target, not the area, with its comprehensive information including the location, time, social relationship, and preferences. We then develop the basic functions of the proposed system and demonstrate its feasibility. We also illustrate three applications (i.e., a remote healthcare system, an anti-crime system, and a system for finding missing children), where the proposed system can enhance security and safety by considering individual surveillance purposes.