Distributed Multimedia Applications Research Articles

A Web-Based Framework for Distributed Music System Research and Creation

This paper presents soundworks, a framework dedicated to prototyping and developing distributed multimedia applications using Web technologies. Since its first release in 2015, the framework has been used in numerous artistic and research projects such as concerts, installations, workshops, teaching or experimental setups. We first present how this diversity of contexts and objectives permitted to identify a set of patterns able to support recurring needs of expert users in exploratory tasks. We then detail new developments that have been achieved to provide better support to these patterns. More particularly, we describe the novel distributed state management system dedicated at simplifying the implementation of remote control and monitoring interfaces and, the plug-in system implemented to improve the extensibility of the framework and foster composition of dedicated functionalities. We believe that these new developments can provide a solid ground to further research and artistic practices in the area of distributed music systems. The soundworks framework is open-source and released under BSD-3-Clause license.

Inter-destination Multimedia Synchronization: A Contemporary Survey

The advent of social networking applications, media streaming technologies, and synchronous communications has created an evolution towards dynamic shared media experiences. In this new model, geographically distributed groups of users can be immersed in a common virtual networked environment in which they can interact and collaborate in real- time within the context of simultaneous media content consumption. In this environment, intra-stream and inter-stream synchronization techniques are used inside the consumers’ playout devices, while synchronization of media streams across multiple separated locations is required. This synchronization is nown as multipoint, group or Inter-Destination Multimedia Synchronization (IDMS) and is needed in many applications such as social TV and synchronous e-learning. This survey paper discusses intraand inter-stream synchronization issues, but it mainly focuses on the most well-known IDMS techniques that can be used in emerging distributed multimedia applications. In addition, it provides some research directions for future work.

Outsourcing Set Intersection Computation Based on Bloom Filter for Privacy Preservation in Multimedia Processing

With the development of cloud computing, the advantages of low cost and high computation ability meet the demands of complicated computation of multimedia processing. Outsourcing computation of cloud could enable users with limited computing resources to store and process distributed multimedia application data without installing multimedia application software in local computer terminals, but the main problem is how to protect the security of user data in untrusted public cloud services. In recent years, the privacy-preserving outsourcing computation is one of the most common methods to solve the security problems of cloud computing. However, the existing computation cannot meet the needs for the large number of nodes and the dynamic topologies. In this paper, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving outsourcing computation method which combines GM homomorphic encryption scheme and Bloom filter together to solve this problem and propose a new privacy-preserving outsourcing set intersection computation protocol. Results show that the new protocol resolves the privacy-preserving outsourcing set intersection computation problem without increasing the complexity and the false positive probability. Besides, the number of participants, the size of input secret sets, and the online time of participants are not limited.

An integrated runtime QoS-aware middleware framework for distributed multimedia applications

Future-generation distributed multimedia applications are expected to be highly scalable to a wide variety of heterogeneous devices, and highly adaptive across wide-area distributed environments. This demands multiple stages of run-time support in QoS-aware middleware architectures, particularly, probing the performance of QoS parameters, instantiating the initial component configurations, and adapting to on-the-fly variations. However, few of the past experiences in related work have shown comprehensive run-time support in all of the above stages they often design and build a middleware framework by focusing on only one of the run-time issues. In this paper, we argue that distributed multimedia applications need effective run-time middleware support in all these stages to be highly scalable and adaptive across a wide variety of execution environments. Nevertheless, the design of such a middleware framework should be kept as streamlined and simple as possible, leading to a novel and integrated run-time middleware platform to unify the probing, instantiation and adaptation stages. In addition, for each stage, the framework should enable the interaction of peer middleware components across host boundaries, so that the corresponding middleware function can be performed in a coordinated and coherent fashion. We present the design of such an integrated architecture, with a case study to illustrate how it is simple yet effective to monitor and configure complex multimedia applications.

EFFICIENT SCHEME FOR CONGESTION CONTROL IN NETWORK-ON-CHIP WITH QoS CONSIDERATION

Embedded distributed multimedia applications based on the use of on-chip networks for communication and messages exchange requires specific and enhanced quality of service (QoS) management. To reach the desired performances at the application level, the network-on-chip (NoC) router should implement per flit handling strategy with wide granularity. This purpose requires an enhanced internal architecture that ensures from one hand a specific management according to a service classification and from the other hand, it enhances the routing process. In this context, this paper proposes a new mechanism for QoS management in NoC. This mechanism is based on the use of central memory where flits are in-queued according to their class of service. This scheme enables an optimal flit scheduling phase and provides more capabilities to drop low important flits when the router shows congestion state symptoms. The paper presents, also, a protocol structure that fills with this architecture and introduces a signaling mechanism to make efficient the QoS management through the proposed architecture. The circuit performances and its adaptability to achieve QoS with low power processing and high bandwidth in on chip multiprocessor systems will be studied in this paper.

Enhanced Adaptive Mechanisms to Improve QOS in Distributed Multimedia Applications

Recent advances in computer communications, especially highly interactivedistributed applications and those relying on the transfer of multimedia information and in particular, continuous media flows. It is essential that QoS is guaranteed in a system, considering distributed system area, the transport protocol and themultiservice network. Quality of Service (QoS) in distributed multimedia systems provides a unifying theme on which the functions and facilities of the new integrated standards can be constructed. The objective of thispaper is tofocusonseveral QoS parametersat different levelsand Enhanced Adaptive Mechanismis proposed in order to improve the performance in distributed multimediaapplications.

A Review of Recent Patents for Quality Assessment of Multimedia Communications by Digital Watermarking

Multimedia communication has gained an increasing interest in the last decade. The design of services and distributed multimedia applications imposes a number of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In particular, the processing and delivery of multimedia content are not independent and their interaction has a major impact on the QoS aspects. Recently, tracing watermarking has been introduced as a blind method for evaluating the QoS of multimedia communications. This paper aims at presenting a review of recent patents, and state of art solutions as well, in the field of QoS assessment of multimedia communication by tracing watermarking. Finally, a discussion pointing out the current and future developments in this area summarizes the remarkable points of this work.

Video quality for face detection, recognition, and tracking

Many distributed multimedia applications rely on video analysis algorithms for automated video and image processing. Little is known, however, about the minimum video quality required to ensure an accurate performance of these algorithms. In an attempt to understand these requirements, we focus on a set of commonly used face analysis algorithms. Using standard datasets and live videos, we conducted experiments demonstrating that the algorithms show almost no decrease in accuracy until the input video is reduced to a certain critical quality, which amounts to significantly lower bitrate compared to the quality commonly acceptable for human vision. Since computer vision percepts video differently than human vision, existing video quality metrics, designed for human perception, cannot be used to reason about the effects of video quality reduction on accuracy of video analysis algorithms. We therefore investigate two alternate video quality metrics, blockiness and mutual information, and show how they can be used to estimate the critical video qualities for face analysis algorithms.

Research on the QoS Control Technology in Overlay Network Based on Distribution Application

In recent years, most distributed multimedia applications are deployed directly on the Internet, and to carry real-time streaming services on the Internet is still very serious challenges. Internet is constructed on the basis of TCP/IP protocol, which provides the only best effort service, and adopts the best strategy of meet competition for all the service requests. This method lacks efficient resource scheduling classification, which leads to a variety of network resource sharing prone to bottlenecks and reduce the network throughput. Therefore, a good way to guarantee quality of service on multimedia application should be established based on the existing Internet architecture. In this paper, firstly, the low load balancing QoS routing technology is proposed with the application requirements of distributed multimedia services in overlay network. Characterization of the path through the establishment on the profit and loss model of resource consumption, resource consumption will be bound into the path of incremental choices. Secondly, the fast QoS re-routing technology is studied, and the introduction of reconstruction costs model, as constrained alternative routing process. Theoretical analysis shows that the method can effectively improve the efficiency of route recovery time and reduce the recovery delay. Finally, a dynamic QoS-aware approach to changes in demand is established. The training samples by the principle of self-learning assessment model to establish a unified system of shielding parameters of the difference between the ability to adapt to different QoS parameters for monitoring.

TCP-friendly congestion control for the fair streaming of scalable video

Dynamic bandwidth estimation serves as an important basis for performance optimization of real-time distributed multimedia applications. The objective of this paper is to develop a TCP-friendly and fair congestion control algorithm which regulates the sending rate robustly by inferring the end-to-end available bandwidth. In addition to network stability, we also consider the characteristics of streaming applications, such as the bandwidth resolution in scalable video coding (SVC) which can achieve fine granularity of scalability at bit level to fit the time-vary heterogeneous networks. The congestion control algorithm is mainly composed of two phases: start phase and transmission phase to better utilize the network resource by subscribing SVC layers. In the start phase, we analyze the relationship between the one-way delay and the dispersion of packet trains, and then propose an available bandwidth inference algorithm which makes use of these two features without requiring administrative access to the intermediate routers along the network path. Instead of either binary search or fixed-rate bandwidth adjustment of the probing data as proposed in literature, a top-down approach is proposed to infer the initial available bandwidth robustly and much more efficiently. After acquiring the initial available bandwidth, the missions of the transmission phase include the adaptation of the sending rate fairly by progressive probing and also the accommodation of the network resource to TCP flows. In case of the unavoidable network congestion, we unsubscribe scalable video layers according to the packet loss rate instead of only dropping one layer at a time to rapidly accommodate the streaming service to the channels and also to avoid persecuting the other flows at the same bottleneck. In addition, the probing packets for the estimation of the available bandwidth are encapsulated with RTP/RTCP. The simulations show that the proposed congestion control algorithm for real-time applications fairly utilizes network bandwidth without hampering the performance of the existing TCP applications.

Open service-oriented architecture for transport protocols

The accelerated progress in internet technologies has widely increased by one hand the diversity of distributed multimedia applications (i.e., IPTV, VoIP, VoD, video-conferencing, etc.) and by the other hand the available network services (i.e., high speed, wireless, mobile, etc.). This important evolution of application and network layers has deeply impacted the role of the traditional transport layer. Moreover, continuous enhancements and new developments of transport protocols have made quite complex for applications the selection of the adequate service for a particular network environment. Furthermore, most of new transport developments have not followed well-known software engineering approaches aimed at facilitating code reusability, integration and interoperability. This paper proposes the Open-Service Oriented Architecture for Transport Protocols (OSOATP) aimed at making easier for applications the selection of the adequate transport services. OSOATP is built following service-oriented and service-component architecture approaches in order to allow smooth integration and dynamic composition of reusable transport components. Studies intended to illustrate the benefits of this architecture are also presented.

Genetic algorithm approach to dynamic multiconstraint multipath QoS routing algorithm for IP networks

Real-time distributed multimedia applications have special requirements in terms of bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc. The current IP network is suitable for applications such as e-mail, ftp, etc., but not suitable for real time multimedia applications that demand different QoS requirements from the underlying network. In order to make the network suitable for such applications many QoS routing algorithms have been proposed. The problem of finding a path which satisfies multiple constraints is a NP-complete problem. Hence, various heuristics have been proposed to find a path that satisfies multiple constraints. To search all feasible paths in less time, many researchers have used the concept of genetic algorithm (GA). This GA approach has been used in this paper to improve the path search time of the existing dynamic multi constraint multi path QoS routing algorithm (DMCMPRA). The simulation results of the improved algorithm are discussed in this paper.

A scalable service-oriented architecture for multimedia analysis, synthesis and consumption

Although Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) were not designed for multimedia processing, they speed up the development of distributed multimedia applications by allowing the composition or reconfiguration of existing services. For example, the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is a powerful tool to orchestrate, model and execute workflows. However, due to its process-oriented approach, it is not directly applicable to data-intensive applications, such as those from the multimedia domain. In this paper, a comprehensive service-oriented infrastructure for multimedia applications is presented that (a) overcomes some drawbacks of BPEL for data-intensive applications and (b) provides tools that further ease the development and use of web services for a broad scope of multimedia applications covering video content analysis, audio analysis and synthesis and multimedia consumption. The proposed service-oriented infrastructure can be easily integrated into existing business processes by using BPEL. A dynamic allocation of cloud computing resources ensures the scalability of a multimedia application. To allow efficient and flexible data transfers in BPEL workflows, an implementation of the Flexible SOAP with Attachments (Flex-SwA) architecture is used that allows data transmission in conjunction with SOAP messages. The protocol requirements of services in the case of real-time, streaming or file transfer can be described by a communication policy. Three use cases of multimedia applications are evaluated.

A Cross-Layer Approach to Enhance QoS for Multimedia Applications Over Satellite

The need for on-demand QoS support for communications over satellite is of primary importance for distributed multimedia applications. This is particularly true for the return link which is often a bottleneck due to the large set of end-users accessing a very limited uplink resource. Facing this need, Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA) is a classical technique that allows satellite operators to offer various types of services, while managing the resources of the satellite system efficiently. Tackling the quality degradation and delay accumulation issues that can result from the use of these techniques, this paper proposes an instantiation of the Application Layer Framing (ALF) approach, using a cross-layer interpreter (xQoS-Interpreter). The information provided by this interpreter is used to manage the resource provided to a terminal by the satellite system in order to improve the quality of multimedia presentations from the end user's point of view. Several experiments are carried out for different loads on the return link. Their impact on QoS is measured through different application as well as network level metrics.

An open architecture for transport-level protocol coordination in distributed multimedia applications

We consider the problem of flow coordination in distributed multimedia applications. Most transport-level protocols are designed to operate independently and lack mechanisms for sharing information with other flows and coordinating data transport in various ways. This limitation becomes problematic in distributed applications that employ numerous flows between two computing clusters sharing the same intermediary forwarding path across the Internet. In this article, we propose an open architecture that supports the sharing of network state information, peer flow information, and application-specific information. Called simply the coordination protocol (CP) , the scheme facilitates coordination of network resource usage across flows belonging to the same application, as well as aiding other types of coordination. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated in the context of multistreaming in 3D tele-immersion where consistency of network information across flows both greatly improves frame transport synchrony and minimizes buffering delay.

Fault-tolerant analysis for multiple servers movie retrieval strategy for distributed multimedia applications

In this paper, we address the problem of retrieving a movie from a set of multimedia(MM) servers by the clients on a network. We consider a strategy in which multiple MM servers are deployed by the service provider (SP) to retrieve a requested MM movie to the clients, for minimizing the access time (the waiting time of the client before initiating the playback) and maximizes the system reliability. We design a movie retrieval strategy that explicitly considers issues such as reliability and/or availability factors of the multimedia servers and the communication channels in the problem formulation. We develop a mathematical model for this retrieval strategy and derive an optimal size of each movie portion that is expected to be rendered by each server. We then derive a closed-form expression for the access time of the MM document and the system reliability which gives a trade-off relationship between access time and reliability (availability) of the service by our strategy. We extend our study to investigate on the effect of sequencing of the servers, the order in which movie portions are to be retrieved, to minimize the access time and to maximize the system reliability. With system reliability factors, we identify an optimal sequence, which maximizes system reliability out of all possible retrieval sequences. We then propose two methods to retrieve any missing movie portions upon a server failure during the retrieval process. In order to measure the quality of service provided by the service provider to its customers, we introduce a QoS parameter that can tune the playback rate to avoid any data underflow or overflow situations. Then, from probabilistic perspective, we obtain an estimate of the failure time of a single server and its resulting missing movie portion caused by this server failure. We conduct rigorous simulation experiments to testify all the theoretical findings reported. Illustrative examples are provided for the ease of understanding.

Multiple-server movie-retrieval strategies for distributed multimedia applications: a play-while-retrieve approach

In this paper, we present a generalized approach to retrieve a long-duration movie requested using a network-based video-on-demand service infrastructure employing multiple servers. We design and analyze a play-while-retrieve (PWR) playback strategy for this multiserver environment such that the access time (waiting time for the clients) is minimized. For this strategy, we use both the single-installment and multi-installment retrieval strategies to analyze the performance of the service system. For the above-mentioned retrieval strategies, we explicitly derive closed-form expressions for a minimum access time. For the case of multi-installment retrieval strategy, we conduct asymptotic performance analysis that quantifies the ultimate performance bounds of our strategy. We demonstrate analytically the impact of a large-scale network, as well as the impact of indefinitely increasing the number of installments, on the performance of such a multiserver service system. We then address the problem of buffer management at the client site, which is a closely related issue that has a significant influence on the performance of the strategy, and also serves as a key issue in making the service system attractive for clients. We derive relationships that quantify the minimum amount of buffer expected at the client site to have a smooth presentation with this multiserver service structure. Finally, we perform simulation experiments to verify all our theoretical findings. In the experiments, we compare the performance of PWR strategy with that of play-after-retrieve strategy, and discuss certain important points that are crucial for implementing a real-life working multiserver service system.

ACM SIGMM retreat report on future directions in multimedia research

The ACM Multimedia Special Interest Group was created ten years ago. Since that time, researchers have solved a number of important problems related to media processing, multimedia databases, and distributed multimedia applications. A strategic retreat was organized as part of ACM Multimedia 2003 to assess the current state of multimedia research and suggest directions for future research. This report presents the recommendations developed during the retreat. The major observation is that research in the past decade has significantly advanced hardware and software support for distributed multimedia applications and that future research should focus on identifying and delivering applications that impact users in the real-world.The retreat suggested that the community focus on solving three grand challenges: (1) make authoring complex multimedia titles as easy as using a word processor or drawing program, (2) make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments, and (3) make capturing, storing, finding, and using digital media an everyday occurrence in our computing environment. The focus of multimedia researchers should be on applications that incorporate correlated media, fuse data from different sources, and use context to improve application performance.

QoS specification languages for distributed multimedia applications: a survey and taxonomy

Following considerable research into quality-of-service-aware application programming interface design and QoS specification language development for multimedia systems, we present a survey and taxonomy of existing QoS specification languages. As computer and communication technology evolves, distributed multimedia applications are becoming ubiquitous, and quality of service (QoS) is becoming ever more integral to those applications. Because they consume so many resources (such as memory and bandwidth), multimedia applications need resource management at different layers of the communications protocol stack to ensure end-to-end service quality, and to regulate resource contention for equitable resource sharing. However, before an application can invoke any QoS-aware resource management mechanisms and policies - such as admission control, resource reservation, enforcement, and adaptation - it must specify its QoS requirements and the corresponding resource allocations. Furthermore, the application must describe how QoS should be scaled and adapted in cases of resource contention or resource scarcity during runtime. Our goal in this article is to systematically classify and compare the existing QoS specification languages that span several QoS layers with diverse properties. The provided taxonomy and the extensive analysis will give us a detailed look at the existing QoS specification languages along with their properties and relations.

Development of instruction tracer for performance evaluation

AbstractApplications such as network server programs and distributed multimedia applications, in which system calls and input/output processing are frequently used, are highly dependent on the operating system. In evaluating the performance of such applications, the execution data for the application and the operating system must be acquired consistently. Conventionally, the performance of a program has mostly been examined through the occurrences of particular events, by means of the performance monitoring function provided by the CPU. The most frequent is the measurement of time based on the cumulative number of clocks in the CPU. In the present computer environment, these values vary depending on the measurement timing. In addition, in these methods, the information concerning the time of occurrence is not preserved when multiple events occur, and there is no means of analyzing the dependency among the events. It is thus difficult for the user to locate the reason for the variation of the value. In order to solve these problems, this paper considers memory access as the measure for performance evaluation. The “SURU” kernel level instruction tracer, the set of “SURU tools” that analyze the output data from TSURU, and the “SURU library” used to construct TSURU tools, are proposed. TSURU can acquire dynamic information such as the execution instruction sequence, the refer address, and the interrupt. Using the TSURU tools to analyze the data acquired by TSURU, the operation of the program under consideration can be traced, and the execution time and the page fault generation rate can be determined. Based on this result, the factors responsible for performance degradation can be analyzed, and the performance improvement obtainable by solving the problem can be estimated. With the TSURU library, the user can easily construct TSURU tools. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(12): 73–83, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20131