Mobile Video Services Research Articles

Capacity Behaviour Using WSDV Scheme over WiMAX

The objective of this project is to create Mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) for 4th generation mobile wireless networks in which it is foreseen that mobile Television (TV) services will reproduce rapidly. In television applications are bandwidth hogs that cause a challenging capacity problem in wireless networks. To address this challenge, a novel scheme for mobile Television services over WiMAX network, called the Wireless Switched Digital Video (WSDV) scheme, is proposed. Compared with the conventional broadcast or unicast schemes, the hybrid approach introduced in the proposed WSDV approach exploits the merits of two conventional schemes and mitigates their demerits, which enables it to increase wireless capacity for mobile Television services. The analytical model can capture the details of WiMAX resource allocation and take into consideration the popularity of the mobile Television contents being viewed by users enabling it to provide an accurate estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for WiMAX TV services and also enabling a designer to optimally select the number of channels via the WSDV service while meeting a desired level of blocking probability. The proposed optimized scheme outperforms the conventional schemes with respect to blocking probability. Finally, an end-to-end solution to the WSDV scheme is also presented.

No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Model for Distortion Caused by Packet Loss in the Real-Time Mobile Video Services

Packet loss will make severe errors due to the corruption of related video data. For most video streams, because the predictive coding structures are employed, the transmission errors in one frame will not only cause decoding failure of itself at the receiver side, but also propagate to its subsequent frames along the motion prediction path, which will bring a significant degradation of end-to-end video quality. To quantify the effects of packet loss on video quality, a no-reference objective quality assessment model is presented in this paper. Considering the fact that the degradation of video quality significantly relies on the video content, the temporal complexity is estimated to reflect the varying characteristic of video content, using the macroblocks with different motion activities in each frame. Then, the quality of the frame affected by the reference frame loss, by error propagation, or by both of them is evaluated, respectively. Utilizing a two-level temporal pooling scheme, the video quality is finally obtained. Extensive experimental results show that the video quality estimated by the proposed method matches well with the subjective quality.

Quantifying the Influence of Rebuffering Interruptions on the User's Quality of Experience During Mobile Video Watching

Entertainment and multimedia are the key functionalities in emerging mobile markets. The ability to understand and quantify the quality of experience (QoE, i.e., the users' subjective perception of the “overall acceptability of an application or service”), will play a major role in the success of these mobile services. This study explores the thresholds at which the technical quality of a mobile video service becomes unacceptable for users. A subjective experiment drawing on the logging of technical parameters combined with subjective evaluations by a user panel resulted in a model for quantifying the acceptability of video interruptions. The results of this analysis provide insights into the QoE and (un)acceptability regarding video interruptions for different network conditions and video parameters. The conclusions of this paper can be used as a guideline for service design and network dimensioning.

A Survey of Digital Television Broadcast Transmission Techniques

This paper is a survey of the transmission techniques used in digital television (TV) standards worldwide. With the increase in the demand for High-Definition (HD) TV, video-on-demand and mobile TV services, there was a real need for more bandwidth-efficient, flawless and crisp video quality, which motivated the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of TV and then we survey the transmission technology used in different digital terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile TV standards in different parts of the world. First, we present the Digital Video Broadcasting standards developed in Europe for terrestrial (DVB-T/T2), for satellite (DVB-S/S2), for cable (DVB-C) and for hand-held transmission (DVB-H). We then describe the Advanced Television System Committee standards developed in the USA both for terrestrial (ATSC) and for hand-held transmission (ATSC-M/H). We continue by describing the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting standards developed in Japan for Terrestrial (ISDB-T) and Satellite (ISDB-S) transmission and then present the International System for Digital Television (ISDTV), which was developed in Brazil by adopteding the ISDB-T physical layer architecture. Following the ISDTV, we describe the Digital Terrestrial television Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard developed in China. Finally, as a design example, we highlight the physical layer implementation of the DVB-T2 standard.

Integration of the digital broadcast mobile television network and the 3G network

The paper presents the results of the research into the opportunities for the integration of mobile broadcast TV networks and cellular 3G networks. We analyzed trends in mobile television services as well as previous studies that aim at finding optimal ways to integrate different types of networks. This paper analyzes the existing mobile television technology, with a special emphasis on the DVB-H technology. We analyzed the conditions, reasons and opportunities for the integration of DVB-H and 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), and the conclusions of these analyzes are supported with the results in practice. Based on these studies, a conclusion on the feasibility of the realization of DVBH/ UMTS hybrid networks is brought.

Defining Mobile Television: The Social Construction and Deconstruction of New and Old Media

This article explores the circumstances surrounding the launch of mobile television services in the United States during the early 2000s. It draws on Rick Altman's method of crisis historiography to contextualize the fragmentation of mobile television's technologies and the confusion that this fragmentation has bred amongst consumers, industry professionals, analysts, and academics. To examine mobile television's “identity crisis,” I trace how this identity crisis has impacted and has been impacted by changing conceptions of the identities of the two media that mobile television endeavors to merge: the cellular phone and television. Based on this case study, I argue that the identity crises that accompany the arrivals of new media technologies do not take place in isolation, but rather have consequences that influence our attitudes toward and engagements with other, more established media.

QoE-oriented 3D video transcoding for mobile streaming

With advance in mobile 3D display, mobile 3D video is already enabled by the wireless multimedia networking, and it will be gradually popular since it can make people enjoy the natural 3D experience anywhere and anytime. In current stage, mobile 3D video is generally delivered over the heterogeneous network combined by wired and wireless channels. How to guarantee the optimal 3D visual quality of experience (QoE) for the mobile 3D video streaming is one of the important topics concerned by the service provider. In this article, we propose a QoE-oriented transcoding approach to enhance the quality of mobile 3D video service. By learning the pre-controlled QoE patterns of 3D contents, the proposed 3D visual QoE inferring model can be utilized to regulate the transcoding configurations in real-time according to the feedbacks of network and user-end device information. In the learning stage, we propose a piecewise linear mean opinion score (MOS) interpolation method to further reduce the cumbersome manual work of preparing QoE patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed transcoding approach can provide the adapted 3D stream to the heterogeneous network, and further provide superior QoE performance to the fixed quantization parameter (QP) transcoding and mean squared error (MSE) optimized transcoding for mobile 3D video streaming.

Cross–layer cross–domain adaptation of mobile video services

This paper deals with the analysis of user perceived visual quality for mobilemultimedia services. H.264/AVC is selected for low resolution video encoding, and a mobile UMTS network is considered for the access to services. First, from subjective tests results, the combined impact of different servi

On QoE monitoring and E2E service assurance in 4G wireless networks

From the users and service providers point of view, the upcoming 4G wireless (WiMAX and LTE) networks are expected to deliver high performance sensitive applications like live mobile TV, video calling, mobile video services, etc. The 4G networks are intended to provide an accurate service view of customer-perceived service quality ? their ?Quality of Experience? or QoE. Delivering high QoE depends on factors that contribute to the user?s perception of the target services as well as the Quality of Service (QoS) of the network. Although a better network QoS in many cases will result in better QoE, fulfilling all traffic QoS parameters alone may not guarantee satisfied users. On the other hand, if the QoS of the network degrades, the QoE of users' applications could be affected significantly. This article presents an integrated view of End-to- End (E2E) QoS and service assurance support in WiMAX and LTE networks. The integrated view also considers the existing cross-layer implementations to achieve the necessary E2E QoS and how the QoS and QoE should and can be monitored over the network in an E2E fashion. The existing cross-layer implementations ensure the E2E QoS performance before establishing the applications. However, even though the network has strong QoS support, the service providers should still monitor the QoS of the network and QoE of users? applications accurately to achieve service quality assurance.

Quality of experience for HTTP adaptive streaming services

The growing consumer demand for mobile video services is one of the key drivers of the evolution of new wireless multimedia solutions requiring exploration of new ways to optimize future wireless networks for video services towards delivering enhanced quality of experience (QoE). One of these key video enhancing solutions is HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS), which has recently been spreading as a form of Internet video delivery and is expected to be deployed more broadly over the next few years. As a relatively new technology in comparison with traditional push-based adaptive streaming techniques, deployment of HAS presents new challenges and opportunities for content developers, service providers, network operators and device manufacturers. One of these important challenges is developing evaluation methodologies and performance metrics to accurately assess user QoE for HAS services, and effectively utilizing these metrics for service provisioning and optimizing network adaptation. In that vein, this article provides an overview of HAS concepts, and reviews the recently standardized QoE metrics and reporting framework in 3GPP. Furthermore, we present an end-to-end QoE evaluation study on HAS conducted over 3GPP LTE networks and conclude with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities in QoE optimization for HAS services.

Mobile television in Italy: The key to success, the cause of failure

Several years ago, the mobile and audio-visual industry was betting on Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld (DVB-H) and mobile television as the newest growth opportunity. But today, commercial deployments are scarce and end-user adoption is below expectations. This article focuses on developments within the Italian market, known as the best developed market for mobile television services in Europe. Making a case study analysis, the article aims to provide an in-depth overview of the Italian mobile television market, and a better insight into the business model design issues mobile service providers face with regard to mobile television. Such an understanding of the pioneering Italian mobile market makes it possible to identify the key factors of the initial success and eventual failure of DVB-H services, setting perspectives for future mobile television services and industries all over the world.

A Robust Mobile Video Streaming in Heterogeneous Emerging Wireless Systems

With the rapid development of heterogeneous emerging wireless technologies and numerous types of mobile devices, the need to support robust mobile video streaming based on the seamless handover in Future Internet is growing. To support the seamless handover, several IP-based mobility management protocols such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), fast handover for the MIPv6 (FMIPv6), Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) were developed. However, MIPv6 depreciates the Quality-of-Service (QoS) and FMIPv6 is not robust for the video services in heterogeneous emerging wireless networks when the Mobile Node (MN) may move to another visited network in contrast with its anticipation. In Future Internet, the possibility of mobile video service failure is more increased because mobile users consisting of multiple wireless network interfaces (WNICs) can frequently change the access networks according to their mobility in heterogeneous wireless access networks such as 3Generation (3G), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) and Bluetooth co-existed. And in this environment, seamless mobility is coupled according to user preferences, enabling mobile users to be “Always Best Connected” (ABC) so that Quality of Experience is optimised and maintained. Even though HMIPv6 and PMIPv6 are proposed for the location management, handover latency enhancement, they still have limit of local mobility region. In this paper, we propose a robust mobile video streaming in Heterogeneous Emerging Wireless Systems. In the proposed scheme, the MN selects the best -according to an appropriate metric- wireless technology for a robust video streaming service among all wireless technologies by reducing the handover latency and initiation time when handover may fail. Through performance evaluation, we show that our scheme provides more robust mechanism than other schemes.

Toward service innovation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the business potential of mobile video services in China via the case study of M‐Vzone.com. It answers two research questions: what are the important factors that affect the adoption of mobile video services for individuals and enterprises? How much the value was added along the mobile video service chain and how were the benefits are realized?Design/methodology/approachGrounded in traditional technology adoption and information diffusion theories, the paper uses an exploratory research approach, including interviews and further analysis from published sources.FindingsThe authors' analysis suggests that three key factors contributed to the success of m‐commerce in the Chinese context: stronger customer relationship management; enhanced video/operation performance; and easier access to resources. From post‐investigation of the results, the authors also found that small‐ to mid‐sized Chinese owners showed a shift from an imitative to an incremental innovative mode of business thinking and practice.Originality/valueThis is the first study that examines mobile video commerce from a business and innovation perspective in China, to the best of the authors' knowledge. The paper investigates opinions from stakeholders directly involved in a mobile video web site and conducts a detailed analysis on the related value chain network. The findings will be of interest to decision makers in the mobile industry, especially those from small‐ to medium‐sized companies searching for an effective way toward service innovation. The paper can serve as a good foundation for future research into mobile service adoption and service innovation topics.

OFDMA channel aware error-resilient mobile streaming video service over mobile WiMAX

The growing demands for advanced mobile multimedia let the wireless mobile Internet access be developed rapidly. The Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) is capable of providing high data rate and flexible Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms. However, one of killer applications, mobile streaming video service from mobile station (MS) to fixed internet network can't still avoid a traditional QoS degradation problem caused by unreliable mobile channel environment. The previous researches show that streaming video service based on downward cross-layer design over OFDMA channel has improved robust features to channel errors, but requires modifications of the existing schedulers, packet ordering, and channel allocation strategies in base station (BS). Now, our goal is that we develop a high error resilient and robust method to channel errors on the OFDMA mobile video device without the modification of conventional functions in WiMAX BS. In this paper, we introduce OFDMA channel aware error resilient video coding method using an upward cross-layer design. Through the extensive simulation results, we prove that the proposed channel-aware intra-refresh coding can recover video damages more efficiently than traditional intra-refresh one over OFDMA channel environment. This error resilience feature can be adapted to all types of streaming video server devices.

Living Avatars Network: Fusing traditional and innovative ethnographic methods through a real‐time mobile video service

This paper presents a study of new technologies potentially enabling access to a sensory feast of places by ‘wired up’ flaněurs, real‐time as well as remote ‘native’ description and interactions and situated oral histories excavated through ‘being in a place’. We describe an inter‐disciplinary research project examining the cultural heritage of Singapore and the use of geo‐location technologies incorporating social networking platforms as a medium for interactive heritage walks. The goal of the project is to engage both locals and non‐locals in experiencing Singapore from a first person perspective, giving them a wider understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity. The Living Avatar Network (LAN) supports sharing experiences and realities in real time through making it possible to ‘walk in someone's shoes’ through a living avatar, re‐experiencing someone's memories of a certain place. Here we describe the approaches deployed in evolving a prototypical service –‘traditional’ ethnographic style methods with the access to the real‐time, lived character of ‘local’ experiences offered by digital photo streams and real‐time video. More broadly, the project acknowledges the potential availability of the experience of being in a place and culture to be widely available through Web 2.0 technologies and people spending more time ‘living digitally’.

Toward enhanced mobile video services over WiMAX and LTE [WiMAX/LTE Update

Wireless networks are on the verge of a third phase of growth. The first phase was dominated by voice traffic, and the second phase, which we are currently in, is dominated by data traffic. In the third phase we predict that the traffic will be dominated by video and will require new ways to optimize the network to prevent saturation. This increase in video traffic is one of the key drivers of the evolution to new mobile broadband standards like WiMAX IEEE 802.16m and 3G LTE and LTE-Advanced, motivating the need to enhance the video service capabilities of future cellular and mobile broadband systems. Therefore, it is important to understand both the potential and limitations of these networks for delivering video content in the future, which will include not only traditional video broadcasts, but also video streaming and uploading in the uplink direction. In that vein this article provides an overview of technology options for enabling multicast and unicast video services over WiMAX and LTE networks, quantifies and compares the video capacities of these networks in realistic environments, and discusses new techniques that could be exploited in the future to further enhance the video capacity and quality of user experience.

Audiovisual quality estimation for mobile video services

Provisioning of mobile video services is rather challenging since in mobile environments, bandwidth and processing resources are limited. Audiovisual content is present in most multimedia services, however, the user expectation of perceived audiovisual quality differs for speech and non-speech contents. The majority of recently proposed metrics for audiovisual quality estimation assumes only one continuous medium, either audio or video. In order to accurately predict the audiovisual quality of a multi-media system it is necessary to apply a metric that takes simultaneously into account audio as well as video quality. When assessing a multi-modal system, one cannot model it only as a simple combination of mono-modal models, because the pure combination of audio and video models does not give a robust perceived-quality performance metric. We show the importance taking into account the cross-modal interaction between audio and video modes also code mutual compensation effect. In this contribution we report on measuring the cross-modal interaction and propose a content adaptive audiovisual metric for video sequences that distinguishes between speech and non-speech audio. Furthermore, the proposed method allows for a reference-free audiovisual quality estimation, which reduces computational complexity and extends applicability.

Completing the convergence puzzle: a survey and a roadmap

Convergence has more than ever been a central issue for fixed and mobile operators throughout the world and is considered to be the next big step in the evolution of telecommunication networks. Convergence opens new market opportunities and competition among network operators and above all offers enhanced user experience. Multimode handsets and the proliferation of terminals and access technologies are generating increasing demands for solutions that enable convergence, seamless handover, and transparent service delivery across heterogeneous access networks. Different strategies are available for operators, depending on the services they intend to deliver to their customers, from basic commercial convergence limited to unified billing for Fixed/Mobile/Internet up to in-dept network convergence covering new applications and services. This article surveys different technologies which offer seamless handover and converged access to mobile voice, video, and data services. It provides first the different network parts involved in defining the operator global convergence strategy and then surveys different technologies which achieve this step-by-step convergence. We present the main features of these technologies and discuss their limitations and potentials to enable convergence in heterogeneous networks. We also provide a personal stance as to the emergence of these technologies and our vision towards the long term converged telecommunication networks.

A mobile video service trial: TOEST

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce Commercial Mobile Video Service Trial (TOEST) of Korea Telecom (KT), relaying experience related to the implementation of mobile video service for portable devices to libraries and information management organizations that are interested in this service.Design/methodology/approachResearch data used were collected from internal materials such as unpublished project reports, RFI, RFP, etc. written throughout the process of implementing projects. The information also draws on the author's experience and involvement in TOEST trial between 2005 and 2007.FindingsFrom the technical perspective, it was confirmed that technical advancements and environments that enable the implementation of mobile video service for portable devices have been fully established. The technical areas that need to be further improved are the advancements of battery capacity, low‐power consumption technology, and functional improvement of the I/O slot in portable devices.Research limitations/implicationsTOEST provides only download type service for portable devices such as PDAs and PMPs. Streaming type service for mobile phones has been performed only for the purpose of internal tests.Practical implicationsFor information management organizations and libraries, mobile video service for portable devices is cutting‐edge technical service that can provide new customer value to users. Also, it is possible to apply profit models from the commercial point of view.Originality/valueThe paper introduces various technical and environmental elements as specifically as possible, including practical things that we have experienced during the course of implementing mobile video service systems for portable devices. Experience in TOEST development would be helpful to information management organizations and libraries planning to provide mobile video service for portable devices.

Design of a DVB-T/H COFDM Receiver for Portable Video Applications [Topics in Circuits for Communications

Mobile video services have generated a lot of interest recently. To reach a cost-effective solution, design trade-offs among system performance, hardware complexity, and power consumption must be considered in the early design phase of such applications. In this article, we present a system overview, simulation platform, and hardware design of a DVB-T/H baseband receiver. Starting with a design platform, several algorithms on both inner and outer receivers are developed to meet target system performance under different channels. Then, system architecture and related key modules are explored, taking into account both silicon area and power consumption. Finally, several design issues related to the integration of the proposed DVB-T/H inner and outer receivers are addressed.