Delivering 360 degree video streaming for virtual and augmented reality presents many technical challenges especially in bandwidth starved wireless environments. Recently, a so-called two-tier approach has been proposed which delivers a basic-tier chunk and select enhancement-tier chunks to improve user experience while reducing network resources consumption. The video chunks are to be transmitted via unicast or multicast over an ultra-dense small cell infrastructure with enough bandwidth where small cells store video chunks in local caches. In this setup, user-cell association algorithms play a central role to efficiently deliver video since users may only download video chunks from the cell they are associated with. Motivated by this, we jointly formulate the problem of user-cell association and video chunk multicasting/unicasting as a mixed integer linear programming, prove its NP-hardness, and study the optimal solution via the Branch-and-Bound method. We then propose two polynomial-time, approximation algorithms and show via extensive simulations that they are near-optimal in practice and improve user experience by 30% compared to baseline user-cell association schemes.
The combination of video streaming services and wireless networks plays an important role in many fields. In this paper, we present an NS-3-based simulation platform for evaluating and optimizing the performance of the video streaming application over wireless networks. The simulation is designed to provide real-time measurements, and thus it saves the high costs for real equipment. The developed platform consists of the video streaming server, video streaming client, and wireless network environment, where the video streaming operation is implemented under UDP protocol and is equipped with an…
Wireless edge networks are promising to provide better video streaming services to mobile users by provisioning computing and storage resources at the edge of wireless network. However, due to the diversity of user interests, user devices, video versions or resolutions, cache sizes, network conditions, etc., it is challenging to decide where to place the video contents, and which cache and video version a mobile user device should select. In this paper, we study the joint optimization of cache-version selection and content placement for adaptive video streaming in wireless edge networks. We pr…
The Quality of Experience (QoE) of streaming service is often degraded by frequent playback interruptions. To mitigate the interruptions, the media player prefetches streaming contents before starting playback, at a cost of delay. We study the QoE of streaming from the perspective of flow dynamics. First, a framework is developed for QoE when streaming users join the network randomly and leave after downloading completion. We compute the distribution of prefetching delay using partial differential equations (PDEs), and the probability generating function of playout buffer starvations using ord…
In this paper, we study video streaming over wireless networks with network coding capabilities. We build upon recent work, which demonstrated that network coding can increase throughput over a broadcast medium, by mixing packets from different flows into a single packet, thus increasing the information content per transmission. Our key insight is that, when the transmitted flows are video streams, network codes should be selected so as to maximize not only the network throughput but also the video quality. We propose video-aware opportunistic network coding schemes that take into account both…
Several alternatives for more efficient spectrum management have been proposed over the last decade, resulting in new techniques for automatic wideband spectrum sensing. However, while spectrum sensing technology is important, understanding, using and taking actions on this data for better spectrum and network resource management is at least equally important. In this paper, we propose a system that is able to automatically detect wireless spectrum events from streaming spectrum sensing data, and enables the consumption of the events as they are produced, as a statistical report or on a per-qu…
We deal with the problem of streaming multiple video streams between pairs of nodes in a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network. The nodes are static, know their locations, and are synchronized (via GPS). We introduce a new interference model that uses variable interference radiuses. We present an algorithm for computing a frequency assignment and a schedule whose goal is to maximize throughput over all the video streams. In addition, we developed a localized flow-control mechanism to stabilize the queue lengths. We simulated traffic scheduled by the algorithm using OMNET++/MixiM (i.e., physical SI…
Mobile cyberphysical systems have received considerable attention over the last decade, as communication, computing and control come together on a common platform. Understanding the complex interactions that govern the behavior of large complex cyberphysical systems is not an easy task. The goal of this paper is to address this challenge in the particular context of multimedia delivery over an autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) network. Bandwidth requirements and stringent delay constraints of real-time video streaming, paired with limitations on computational complexity and power consumptions im…
We address the problem of video streaming packets from an Access Point (AP) to multiple clients over a shared wireless channel with fading. In such systems, each client maintains a buffer of packets from which to play the video, and an outage occurs in the streaming whenever the buffer is empty. Clients can switch to a lower-quality of video packet, or request packet transmission at a higher energy level in order to minimize the number of outages plus the number of outage periods and the number of low quality video packets streamed, while there is an average power constraint on the AP. We pose…
Recent advances in software-defined mobile networks (SDMNs), in-network caching, and mobile edge computing (MEC) can have great effects on video services in next generation mobile networks. In this paper, we jointly consider SDMNs, in-network caching, and MEC to enhance the video service in next generation mobile networks. With the objective of maximizing the mean measurement of video quality, an optimization problem is formulated. Due to the coupling of video data rate, computing resource, and traffic engineering (bandwidth provisioning and paths selection), the problem becomes intractable in…
Advancements in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology have enabled Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to gather, process and transport multimedia (MM) data as well and not just limited to handling ordinary scalar data anymore. This new generation of WSN type is called Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Better and yet relatively cheaper sensors that are able to sense both scalar data and multimedia data with more advanced functionalities such as being able to handle rather intense computations easily have sprung up. In this paper, the applications, architectures, chall…
In today's Internet, video is the most dominant application and in addition to this, wireless networks such as WiFi, Cellular, and Bluetooth have become ubiquitous. Hence, most of the Internet traffic is video over wireless nodes. There is a plethora of research to improve video streaming to achieve high Quality of Experience (QoE) over the Internet. Many of them focus on wireless nodes. Recent measurement studies often show QoE of video suffers in many wireless clients over the Internet. Recently, many research papers have presented models and schemes to optimize the Adaptive BitRate (ABR) ba…
The massive proliferation of wireless infrastructures with complementary characteristics prompts the bandwidth aggregation for Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT) over heterogeneous access networks. Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is the standard transport-layer solution to enable CMT in multihomed communication environments. However, delivering high-quality streaming video with the existing CMT solutions still remains problematic due to the stringent QoS (Quality of Service) requirements and path asymmetry in heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we advance the state of …
MillimeterWave communications in the 60 GHz band are considered one of the key technologies for enabling multi-gigabit wireless access. However, the high propagation loss in such a band poses major obstacles to the optimal utilization of the wireless resources, where the problem of efficient client association to access points (APs) is of vital importance. In this paper, the client association in 60 GHz wireless access networks is investigated. The AP utilization and the quality of the rapidly vanishing communication links are the control parameters. Because of the tricky non-convex and combin…
Most of today's mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces and one of the main bandwidth-hungry applications that would benefit from multipath communications is wireless video streaming. However, most of the current transport protocols do not match the requirements of video streaming applications or are not designed to address relevant issues, such as delay constraints, networks heterogeneity, and head-of-line blocking issues. This survey provides a holistic literature review of multipath wireless video streaming, shedding light on the different alternatives from an end-to-en…
The signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) is of key importance for the analysis and design of wireless networks. For addressing new requirements imposed on wireless communication, in particular high availability, a highly accurate modeling of the SINR is needed. We propose a stochastic model of the SINR distribution where shadow fading is characterized by random variables. Therein, the impact of shadow fading on the user association is incorporated by modification of the distributions involved. The SINR model is capable to describe all parts of the SINR distribution in detail, especial…
In millimeterWave wireless networks the rapidly varying wireless channels demand fast and dynamic resource allocation mechanisms. This challenge is hereby addressed by a distributed approach that optimally solves the fundamental resource allocation problem of joint client association and relaying. The problem is posed as a multi assignment optimization, for which a novel solution method is established by a series of transformations that lead to a tractable minimum cost flow problem. The method allows to design distributed auction solution algorithms where the clients and relays act asynchronou…
Virtual Reality (VR) applications require high data rate for a high-quality immersive experience, in addition to low latency to avoid dizziness and motion sickness. One of the key wireless VR challenges is providing seamless connectivity and meeting the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements. This work proposes a proactive wireless VR system that utilizes information about the user's future orientation for proactive scheduling and caching. This is achieved by leveraging deep neural networks to predict users' orientation trained on a real dataset. The 360° scene is then partitioned using …
Unraveling quality of experience (QoE) of video streaming is very challenging in bandwidth shared wireless networks. It is unclear how QoE metrics such as starvation probability and buffering time interact with dynamics of streaming traffic load. In this paper, we collect view records from one of the largest streaming providers in China over two weeks and perform an in-depth measurement study on flow arrival and viewing time that shed light on the real traffic pattern. Our most important observation is that the viewing time of streaming users fits a hyper-exponential distribution quite well. T…
Video streaming is in high demand by mobile users, as recent studies indicate. In cellular networks, however, the unreliable wireless channel leads to two major problems. Poor channel states degrade video quality and interrupt the playback when a user cannot sufficiently fill its local playout buffer: buffer underruns occur. In contrast to that, good channel conditions cause common greedy buffering schemes to pile up very long buffers. Such over-buffering wastes expensive wireless channel capacity. To keep buffering in balance, we employ a novel approach. Assuming that we can predict data rate…
We consider the problem of maximizing the alpha-fairness utility over the downlink of a heterogeneous wireless network (HetNet) by jointly optimizing the association of users to transmission points (TPs) and the activation fractions of all TPs. Activation fraction of each TP is the fraction of the frame duration for which it is active, and together these fractions influence the interference seen in the network. To address this joint optimization problem we adopt an approach wherein the activation fractions and the user associations are optimized in an alternating manner. The sub-problem of det…
Consumer Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely used in various application areas, such as entertainment and medicine. In spite of the superb immersion experience, to enable high-quality VR on untethered mobile devices remains an extremely challenging task. The high bandwidth demands of VR streaming generally overburden a conventional wireless connection, which affects the user experience and in turn limits the usability of VR in practice. In this paper, we propose FoVR, attention-based hierarchical VR streaming through bandwidth-limited wireless networks. The design of FoVR stems from the insig…
Recently, the way people consume video content has been undergoing a dramatic change. Plain TV sets, that have been the center of home entertainment for a long time, are losing grounds to Hybrid TV's, PC's, game consoles, and, more recently, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new predominant paradigm is: watch what I want, when I want, and where I want. The challenges of this shift are manifold. On the one hand, broadcast technologies such as DVB-T/C/S need to be extended or replaced by mechanisms supporting asynchronous viewing, such as IPTV and video streaming over best-effo…
In cellular wireless networks, user association refers to the problem of assigning mobile users to base station cells -- a critical, but challenging, problem in many emerging small cell and heterogeneous networks. This paper considers a general class of utility maximization problems for joint optimization of mobile user associations and bandwidth and power allocations. The formulation can incorporate a large class of network topologies, interference models, SNR-to-rate mappings and network constraints. In addition, the model can applied in carrier aggregation scenarios where mobiles can be ser…
In this paper we design and implement a resource management scheme based on cooperative association, where the STAs can share useful information in order to improve the performance of the association/handoff procedures. The cooperative association mechanism is inspired by the rapidly designed cooperative protocols in the field of wireless networks. Furthermore, we introduce a load balancing mechanism that operates in a cross-layer manner taking into account uplink and downlink channel conditions, routing performance and congestion control. The iterative heuristic algorithms that we propose, co…
In this paper, we propose a novel social network aware approach for user association in wireless small cell networks. The proposed approach exploits social relationships between user equipments (UEs) and their physical proximity to optimize the network throughput. We formulate the problem as a matching game between UEs and their serving nodes (SNs). In our proposed game, the serving node can be a small cell base station (SCBS) or an important node with device-to-device capabilities. In this game, the SCBSs and UEs maximize their respective utility functions capturing both the spatial and socia…
In this paper, we present an approach for joint rate allocation and quality selection for a novel video streaming scheme called streamloading. Streamloading is a recently developed method for delivering high quality video without violating copyright enforced restrictions on content access for video streaming. In regular streaming services, content providers restrict the amount of viewable video that users can download prior to playback. This approach can cause inferior user experience due to bandwidth variations, especially in mobile networks with varying capacity. In streamloading, the video …
For wireless caching networks, the scheme design for content delivery is non-trivial in the face of the following tradeoff. On one hand, to optimize overall throughput, users can associate their nearby APs with great channel capacities; however, this may lead to unstable queue backlogs on APs and prolong request delays. On the other hand, to ensure queue stability, some users may have to associate APs with inferior channel states, which would incur throughput loss. Moreover, for such systems, how to conduct predictive scheduling to reduce delays and the fundamental limits of its benefits remai…
We investigate methods for network association that improve the reliability of uplink transmissions in dense wireless heterogeneous networks. The stochastic geometry analysis shows that the double association, in which an uplink transmission is transmitted to a macro Base Station (BS) and small BS, significantly improves the probability of successful transmission.
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimal scalable video delivery to mobile users in wireless networks given arbitrary Quality Adaptation (QA) mechanisms. In current practical systems, QA and scheduling are performed independently by the content provider and network operator, respectively. While most research has been focused on jointly optimizing these two tasks, the high complexity that comes with a joint approach makes the implementation impractical. Therefore, we present a scheduling mechanism that takes the QA logic of each user as input and optimizes the scheduling accordingly. H…
Zoomable video streaming refers to a new class of interactive video applications, where users can zoom into a video stream to view a selected region of interest in higher resolutions and pan around to move the region of interest. The zoom and pan effects are typically achieved by breaking the source video into a grid of independently decodable tiles. Streaming the tiles to a set of heterogeneous users using broadcast is challenging, as users have different link rates and different regions of interest at different resolution levels. In this paper, we consider the following problem: given the su…
Key performance indicators(KPIs) are of great significance in the monitoring of wireless network service quality. The network service quality can be improved by adjusting relevant configuration parameters(CPs) of the base station. However, there are numerous CPs and different cells may affect each other, which bring great challenges to the association analysis of wireless network data. In this paper, we propose an adjustable multi-level association rule mining framework, which can quantitatively mine association rules at each level with environmental information, including engineering paramete…
Motivated by emerging vision-based intelligent services, we consider the problem of rate adaptation for high quality and low delay visual information delivery over wireless networks using scalable video coding. Rate adaptation in this setting is inherently challenging due to the interplay between the variability of the wireless channels, the queuing at the network nodes and the frame-based decoding and playback of the video content at the receiver at very short time scales. To address the problem, we propose a low-complexity, model-based rate adaptation algorithm for scalable video streaming s…
This paper considers one-hop device-to-device (D2D)-assisted wireless caching networks that cache video files of varying quality levels, with the assumption that the base station can control the video quality but cache-enabled devices cannot. Two problems arise in such a caching network: file placement problem and node association problem. This paper suggests a method to cache videos of different qualities, and thus of varying file sizes, by maximizing the sum of video quality measures that users can enjoy. There exists an interesting trade-off between video quality and video diversity, i.e., …
In this paper, a novel social network-aware user association in wireless small cell networks with underlaid device-to-device (D2D) communication is investigated. The proposed approach exploits social strategic relationships between user equipments (UEs) and their physical proximity to optimize the overall network performance. This problem is formulated as a matching game between UEs and their serving nodes (SNs) in which, an SN can be a small cell base station (SCBS) or an important UE with D2D capabilities. The problem is cast as a many-to-one matching game in which UEs and SNs rank one anoth…
The predominant use of wireless access networks is for media streaming applications, which are only gaining popularity as ever more devices become available for this purpose. However, current access networks treat all packets identically, and lack the agility to determine which clients are most in need of service at a given time. Software reconfigurability of networking devices has seen wide adoption, and this in turn implies that agile control policies can be now instantiated on access networks. The goal of this work is to design, develop and demonstrate FlowBazaar, an market-based approach t…
Content storage at the network edge is a promising solution to mitigate the excessive traffic load due to on-demand streaming applications as well as to reduce the streaming delay. To this end, cache-enabled cellular architectures can be utilized to increase the provided quality-of-service (QoS) and to reduce the network cost. However, there are certain issues to be considered in the design of the content storage strategy such that the contents should be refreshed in order to responds user`s expectations. Using a frequent cache refreshment strategy the ratio of satisfied users can be increased…
We consider the problem of simultaneous on-demand streaming of stored video to multiple users in a multi-cell wireless network where multiple unicast streaming sessions are run in parallel and share the same frequency band. Each streaming session is formed by the sequential transmission of video "chunks," such that each chunk arrives into the corresponding user playback buffer within its playback deadline. We formulate the problem as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) where the objective is to fairly maximize users' video streaming Quality of Experience (QoE) and then derive an iterative con…
Joint access point (AP) association and physical carrier sensing (PCS) threshold selection has the potential to improve the performance in high density wireless LANs (WLANs) under high contention, interference and self-interference (SI) limited transmissions. Using tools from stochastic geometry, user and AP locations are independent realizations of spatial point processes. Considering the inherent effects of the channel access protocol, the spatial density of throughput (SDT), which depends on channel access probability and coverage rate, is derived as the performance objective. Leveraging sp…
We present a new stochastic service model with capacity sharing and interruptions, appropriate for the evaluation of the quality of real-time streaming (RTS), like e.g. mobile TV, in wireless cellular networks. The general model takes into account multi-class Markovian process of call arrivals, (to capture different radio channel conditions, requested streaming bit-rates and durations) and allows for a general resource allocation policy saying which users are temporarily denied the requested fixed streaming bit-rates (put in outage) due to resource constraints. We give expressions for several …
To facilitate wireless transmission of multimedia content to mobile users, we propose a content caching and distribution framework for smart grid enabled OFDM networks, where each popular multimedia file is coded and distributively stored in multiple energy harvesting enabled serving nodes (SNs), and the green energy distributively harvested by SNs can be shared with each other through the smart grid. The distributive caching, green energy sharing and the on-grid energy backup have improved the reliability and performance of the wireless multimedia downloading process. To minimize the total on…
This paper proposes a video delivery strategy for dynamic streaming services which maximizes time-average streaming quality under a playback delay constraint in wireless caching networks. The network where popular videos encoded by scalable video coding are already stored in randomly distributed caching nodes is considered under adaptive video streaming concepts, and distance-based interference management is investigated in this paper. In this network model, a streaming user makes delay-constrained decisions depending on stochastic network states: 1) caching node for video delivery, 2) video q…
Private deployments of 4G and 5G networks in industrial environments are beneficial from various aspects. Private 4G/5G networks typically face the challenge of supporting heterogeneous industrial applications. This technology demonstration highlights the importance of network slicing in private 4G/5G networks. It shows that network slicing is crucial for performance guarantees in multi-service co-existence scenarios. With network slicing, our private 4G/5G network successfully supports closed-loop control, event-driven control and video streaming applications.
A challenging problem in multi-band multi-cell self-organized wireless systems, such as multi-channel Wi-Fi networks, femto/pico cells in 3G/4G cellular networks, and more recent wireless networks over TV white spaces, is of distributed resource allocation. This involves four components: channel selection, client association, channel access, and client scheduling. In this paper, we present a unified framework for jointly addressing the four components with the global system objective of maximizing the clients throughput in a proportionally fair manner. Our formulation allows a natural dissocia…
Engineers have numerous low-power wireless sensor devices in the current network setup for the Internet of Things, such as ZigBee, LoRaWAN, ANT, or Bluetooth. These low-power wireless sensors are the best candidates to transfer and collect data. But they are all vulnerable to the physical jamming attack since it is not costly for the attackers to run low power jammer sources in these networks. Having multiple gateways and providing alternative connections to sensors would help these networks to mitigate successful jamming. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to solve the problem of g…
The unprecedented growth of mobile video traffic is adding significant pressure to the energy drain at both the network and the end user. Energy efficient video transmission techniques are thus imperative to cope with the challenge of satisfying user demand at sustainable costs. In this paper, we investigate how predicted user rates can be exploited for energy efficient video streaming with the popular HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (AS) protocols (e.g. DASH). To this end, we develop an energy-efficient Predictive Green Streaming (PGS) optimization framework that leverages predictions of wirele…
This paper studies the problem of mobile video delivery in heterogenous wireless networks from a server to multihomed device. Most existing works only consider delivering video streaming on single path which bandwidth is limited causing ultimate video transmission rate. To solve this live video streaming transmission bottleneck problem, we propose a novel solution named Joint Data Allocation and Fountain Coding (JDAFC) method that contain below characters: (1) path selection, (2) dynamic data allocation, and (3) fountain coding. We evaluate the performance of JDAFC by simulation experiments us…
This paper presents a Brownian-approximation framework to optimize the quality of experience (QoE) for real-time video streaming in wireless networks. In real-time video streaming, one major challenge is to tackle the natural tension between the two most critical QoE metrics: playback latency and video interruption. To study this trade-off, we first propose an analytical model that precisely captures all aspects of the playback process of a real-time video stream, including playback latency, video interruptions, and packet dropping. Built on this model, we show that the playback process of a r…
When there is a possibility to wirelessly stream video over a network, a sophisticated computer analysis of the transmitted video is possible. Such process is used in biomechanics when it is important to analyze athletes performance via streaming digital uncompressed video to a computer and then analyzing it using specific software such as Arial Performance Analysis Systems or Dartfish. This manuscript presents some approaches and challenges in streaming video as well as some applications of Information Technology in biomechanics. An example of how scientists from Indiana State University appr…
Wireless sensor networks hold a great potential in the deployment of several applications of a paramount importance in our daily life. Video sensors are able to improve a number of these applications where new approaches adapted to both wireless sensor networks and video transport specific characteristics are required. The aim of this work is to provide the necessary bandwidth and to alleviate the congestion problem to video streaming. In this paper, we investigate various load repartition strategies for congestion control mechanism on top of a multipath routing feature. Simulations are perfor…
Multi-connectivity has emerged as a key enabler for providing seamless connectivity in cellular mobile networks. However, its potential for improving the quality of multicast transmissions has remained unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the use of multi-connectivity in wireless multicast streaming. Multi-connectivity can significantly improve the performance of multicast services. It especially benefits the cell edge users who often suffer from poor channel conditions. In this work, we assess the impact of multi-connectivity on the performance of multicast streaming. We propose procedur…
