Measures to quantify the gain of multicast with application to IPTV transmissions via WiMAX networks

In applications like IPTV, multicasting provides beneficial services. However, due to overhead and problems of multicast transmission, multicasting is not always profitable. In order to make well-justified decisions whether it is worthwhile to use multicasting or not, its efficiency must be quantified. Therefore, the metric of ‘multicast gain’ is introduced as a measure for the bandwidth reduction which can be expected when using multicast (instead of multiple unicast). Different definitions for multicast gain are given to cover different types of links. As an application of our metric, multicast transmission of live TV channels in WiMAX-based access networks is analyzed. WiMAX as one of the 4G candidates can transmit IPTV services to mobile subscribers because of salient features such as multicast support, wide coverage range and high bandwidth. In OFDMA-based WiMAX the smallest logical bandwidth allocation unit is a slot. In this article, we use the term slot to measure the efficiency of multicasting in WiMAX networks. We show that for unpopular TV channels, using unicast flows can be preferable.     

On the synthetic dataset generation for IPTV services based on user behavior

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The adoption of the paradigm shift from push-based media broadcasting to pull-based media streaming has seen a significant growth in the recent decade. IPTV is...     

Multistakeholder recommendation: Survey and research directions

Recommender systems provide personalized information access to users of Internet services from social networks to e-commerce to media and entertainment. As is appropriate for research in a field with a focus on personalization, academic studies of recommender systems have largely concentrated on optimizing for user experience when designing, implementing and evaluating their algorithms and systems. However, this concentration on the user has meant that the field has lacked a systematic exploration of other aspects of recommender system outcomes. A user-centric approach limits the ability to incorporate system objectives, such as fairness, balance, and profitability, and obscures concerns that might come from other stakeholders, such as the providers or sellers of items being recommended. Multistakeholder recommendation has emerged as a unifying framework for describing and understanding recommendation settings where the end user is not the sole focus. This article outlines the multistakeholder perspective on recommendation, highlighting example research areas and discussing important issues, open questions, and prospective research directions.

     

A homotopy-based moving horizon estimation

Moving horizon estimation (MHE) solves a constrained dynamic optimisation problem. Including nonlinear dynamics into an optimal estimation problem generally comes at the cost of tackling a non-convex optimisation problem. Here, a particular model formulation is proposed in order to convexify a class of nonlinear MHE problems. It delivers a linear time-varying (LTV) model that is globally equivalent to the nonlinear dynamics in a noise-free environment, hence the optimisation problem becomes convex. On the other hand, in the presence of unknown disturbances, the accuracy of the LTV model degrades and this results in a less accurate solution. For this purpose, some assumptions are imposed and a homotopy-based approach is proposed in order to transform the problem from convex to non-convex, where the sequential implementation of this technique starts with solving the convexified MHE problem. Two simulation studies validate the efficiency and optimality of the proposed approach with unknown disturbances.