Multimedia Applications In Networks Research Articles

Mathematical Model of Heterogeneous Traffic in LTE Networks

With the introduction of multimedia mobile applications in cellular networks, effective methods have been used to increase throughput. The article defines methods for dividing cellular network resources through mathematical modeling for heterogeneous traffic. The numerical properties of the indicators of joint servicing of requests, the efficiency of joint transmission of real-time traffic and elastic data traffic have been studied. Explores key uses of traffic model resource bandwidth.

Optimized Visual Internet of Things in Video Processing for Video Streaming

The global expansion of the Visual Internet of Things (VIoT) has enabled various new applications during the last decade through the interconnection of a wide range of devices and sensors.Frame freezing and buffering are the major artefacts in broad area of multimedia networking applications occurring due to significant packet loss and network congestion. Numerous studies have been carried out in order to understand the impact of packet loss on QoE for a wide range of applications. This paper improves the video streaming quality by using the proposed framework Lossy Video Transmission (LVT) for simulating the effect of network congestion on the performance of encrypted static images sent over wireless sensor networks.The simulations are intended for analysing video quality and determining packet drop resilience during video conversations.The assessment of emerging trends in quality measurement, including picture preference, visual attention, and audio visual quality is checked. To appropriately quantify the video quality loss caused by the encoding system, various encoders compress video sequences at various data rates.Simulation results for different QoE metrics with respect to user developed videos have been demonstrated which outperforms the existing metrics.

Image Splicing Detection Using Generalized Whittaker Function Descriptor

Image forgery is a crucial part of the transmission of misinformation, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. The powerful image editing software has made it nearly impossible to detect altered images with the naked eye. Images must be protected against attempts to manipulate them. Image authentication methods have gained popularity because of their use in multimedia and multimedia networking applications. Attempts were made to address the consequences of image forgeries by creating algorithms for identifying altered images. Because image tampering detection targets processing techniques such as object removal or addition, identifying altered images remains a major challenge in research. In this study, a novel image texture feature extraction model based on the generalized k-symbol Whittaker function (GKSWF) is proposed for better image forgery detection. The proposed method is divided into two stages. The first stage involves feature extraction using the proposed GKSWF model, followed by classification using the “support vector machine” (SVM) to distinguish between authentic and manipulated images. Each extracted feature from an input image is saved in the features database for use in image splicing detection. The proposed GKSWF as a feature extraction model is intended to extract clues of tampering texture details based on the probability of image pixel. When tested on publicly available image dataset “CASIA” v2.0 (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation), the proposed model had a 98.60% accuracy rate on the YCbCr (luminance (Y), chroma blue (Cb) and chroma red (Cr)) color spaces in image block size of 8 × 8 pixels. The proposed image authentication model shows great accuracy with a relatively modest dimension feature size, supporting the benefit of utilizing the k-symbol Whittaker function in image authentication algorithms.

Network Condition-Aware Enhanced Distributed Channel Access for IEEE 802.11e Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract The increasing use of multimedia applications in wireless ad-hoc networks makes the support of quality of service (QoS) an overriding necessity. In this article, we present a new extension of the IEEE 802.11e EDCA scheme called NCA-EDCA, which uses the lifetime and the number of retransmissions attempts of a packet to assess the aggressiveness of the environment in order to adjust the channel access parameters to work in the best possible way and improve service quality accordingly. This new extension aims to (1) improve the performance of real-time applications; (2) increase the overall throughput by reducing the collision rate and (3) achieve an acceptable level of fairness. The simulation results show that our extension significantly improves EDCA for better QoS support of multimedia applications. More specifically, it increases throughput of the different flows by no negligible factors and significantly reduces the collision rate while maintaining a high degree of fairness between flows of equal priority.

CMT-SCTP and MPTCP Multipath Transport Protocols: A Comprehensive Review

A huge amount of generated data is regularly exploding into the network by the users through smartphones, laptops, tablets, self-configured Internet-of-things (IoT) devices, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. In such a situation, satisfying critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements (e.g., throughput, latency, bandwidth, and reliability) is a large challenge as a vast amount of data travels into the network. Nowadays, strict QoS requirements must be satisfied efficiently in many networked multimedia applications when intelligent multi-homed devices are used. Such devices support the concept of multi-homing. To be precise, they have multiple network interfaces that aim to connect and communicate concurrently with different networking technologies. Therefore, many multipath transport protocols are provided to multi-homed devices, which aim (1) to take advantage of several network paths at the transport layer (Layer-4) and (2) to meet the strict QoS requirements for providing low network latency, higher data rates, and increased reliability. To this end, this survey first presents the challenges/problems for supporting multipath transmission with possible solutions. Then, it reviews recent research efforts related to the concurrent multipath transmission (CMT) protocol and the multipath transmission control protocol (MPTCP). It reviews the latest research efforts by considering (1) how a multipath transport protocol operates (i.e., its functionality); (2) in what type of network; (3) what path characteristics it should consider; and (4) how it addresses various design challenges. Furthermore, it presents some lessons learned and discusses open research issues in multipath transport protocols.

Wireless power transfer and energy harvesting in distributed sensor networks: Survey, opportunities, and challenges

Distributed sensor networks have emerged as part of the advancements in sensing and wireless technologies and currently support several applications, including continuous environmental monitoring, surveillance, tracking, and so on which are running in wireless sensor network environments, and large-scale wireless sensor network multimedia applications that require large amounts of data transmission to an access point. However, these applications are often hampered because sensor nodes are energy-constrained, low-powered, with limited operational lifetime and low processing and limited power-storage capabilities. Current research shows that sensors deployed for distributed sensor network applications are low-power and low-cost devices characterized with multifunctional abilities. This contributes to their quick battery drainage, if they are to operate for long time durations. Owing to the associated cost implications and mode of deployments of the sensor nodes, battery recharging/replacements have significant disadvantages. Energy harvesting and wireless power transfer have therefore become very critical for applications running for longer time durations. This survey focuses on presenting a comprehensive review of the current literature on several wireless power transfer and energy harvesting technologies and highlights their opportunities and challenges in distributed sensor networks. This review highlights updated studies which are specific to wireless power transfer and energy harvesting technologies, including their opportunities, potential applications, limitations and challenges, classifications and comparisons. The final section presents some practical considerations and real-time implementation of a radio frequency–based energy harvesting wireless power transfer technique using Powercast™ power harvesters, and performance analysis of the two radio frequency–based power harvesters is discussed. Experimental results show both short-range and long-range applications of the two radio frequency–based energy harvesters with high power transfer efficiency.

SDN Enabled QoE and Security Framework for Multimedia Applications in 5G Networks

The technologies for real-time multimedia transmission and immersive 3D gaming applications are rapidly emerging, posing challenges in terms of performance, security, authentication, data privacy, and encoding. The communication channel for these multimedia applications must be secure and reliable from network attack vectors and data-contents must employ strong encryption to preserve privacy and confidentiality. Towards delivering secure multimedia application environment for 5G networks, we propose an SDN/NFV (Software-Defined-Networking/Network-Function-Virtualization) framework called STREK , which attempts to deliver highly adaptable Quality-of-Experience (QoE), Security, and Authentication functions for multi-domain Cloud to Edge networks. The STREK architecture consists of a holistic SDNFV dataplane, NFV service-chaining and network slicing, a lightweight adaptable hybrid cipher scheme called TREK, and an open RESTful API for applications to deploy custom policies at runtime for multimedia services. For multi-domain/small-cell deployments, the key-generation scheme is dynamic at flow/session-level, and the handover authentication scheme uses a novel method to exchange security credentials with the Access Points (APs) of neighborhood cells. This scheme is designed to improve authentication function during handover with low overhead, delivering the 5G ultra-low latency requirements. We present the experiments with both software and hardware-based implementations and compare our solution with popular lightweight cryptographic solutions, standard open source software, and SDN-based research proposals for 5G multimedia. In the microbenchmarks, STREK achieves smaller hardware, low overhead, low computation, higher attack resistance, and offers better network performance for multimedia streaming applications. In real-time multimedia use-cases, STREK shows greater level of quality distortion for multimedia contents with minimal encryption bitrate overhead to deliver data confidentiality, immunity to common cryptanalysis, and significant resistance to communication channel attacks, in the context of low-latency 5G networks.

Link Quality and Load Balancing Multipath Geographic Routing for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Multimedia applications in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) demand a high level of quality of service (QoS) requirements. The multipath routing approach is considered as an effective solution to meet these requirements. However, the high-energy consumption in WMSNs is a critical concern for lifetime of network contains sensor nodes with limited battery. Many proposed works have designed multipath routing protocols to provide load balancing between discovered paths, although there is a trade-off between power efficiency and data delivery. This paper proposes a link quality and load balancing multipath geographic routing (LQLB-MGR) protocol for WMSNs. This protocol consists of two phases. The first phase is responsible to find multiple node-disjoint paths with high link quality and the second phase allows load balancing between the discovered paths based on nodal residual energy. Simulation results show that LQLB-MGR provides better performance compared to other protocols.

Novel 4:2 Approximate Compressor Designs for Multimedia and Neural Network Applications

Low power dissipation in approximate arithmetic circuits has laid the foundation for area-efficient computational units for error resilient applications like image and signal processing. This paper proposes two novel low power high speed architectures for approximate 4:2 compressor that can be employed in multipliers for partial product summation. The two designs presented ([Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]) have Error Distance (ED) of [Formula: see text] and Error Rate (ER) of 25%. The proposed [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are able to achieve reduction in power and delay by (62.50%, 47.67%) and (83.13%, 60.20%), respectively, in comparison with the exact 4:2 compressor. To verify the effectiveness of the design, the proposed architectures are used to implement [Formula: see text] Dadda multiplier. The equal number of errors in positive and negative directions in the proposed designs aid in reducing the Mean Error Distance (MED) and Mean Relative Error Distance (MRED) of the multiplier. Multiplication of images and two-level decomposition of 2D Haar wavelets are implemented using the designed Dadda multiplier. The efficiency of the image processing applications is measured in terms of Mean Structural Similarity (MSSIM) index and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and an average of 0.98 and 35[Formula: see text]dB, respectively, is obtained, which are in the acceptable range. In addition, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based LeNet-1 Handwritten Digit Recognition System (HDRS) is implemented using the proposed compressor-based multipliers. The proposed compressor-based architectures are able to achieve an average accuracy of 96.23%.

BER performance of OCDMA system based on optimised 2D PhC passive encoder

This study introduces an accurate design and optimisation of a passive optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) network encoder using the coupled cavity waveguide (CCW) as an optical delay line. Such CCW has the capability of providing more time delay with minimum encoder size. The proposed design and analysis are based on the two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystal (PhC) structure. Additionally, two different 2D-PhC structures are studied, in which a silicon material with an effective refractive index of 3.487 is used. The first structure is a silicon bar in air background, whereas the second one is air holes in a silicon substrate. Furthermore, the behaviour of the proposed 2D-PhC structures is studied over the wavelength, ranging from 1300 to 1600 nm. Since the structure geometry is simple with a clear operating principle, it is sufficient to use in the photonic integrated circuits. Moreover, the performance analysis of such design is investigated in terms of the bit error rate (BER) calculations. Finally, the results showed that a 21% BER performance enhancement was achieved using the optimised silicon bars in air background encoder model and this model can be utilised for the multimedia applications in the OCDMA networks.

An intelligent memory caching architecture for data-intensive multimedia applications

With the rapid developments in cloud computing and mobile networks, multimedia content can be accessed conveniently. Recently, some novel intelligent caching-based approaches have been proposed to improve the memory architectures for multimedia applications. These applications often face bottleneck related challenges which result in performance degradation and service delay issues. Intelligent multimedia network applications access the shared data by using a specific network file system. This results in answering the processing related constraints on hard-drive storage and might result in bringing bottleneck issues. Therefore, to improve the performance of these multimedia network applications, we present an intelligent distributed memory caching system. We integrate the multimedia application message passing interface in a multi-threaded environment and propose an algorithm which can handle concurrent response behavior for different multimedia applications. Results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms traditional approaches in terms of throughput and file read access features.

Mobility-Aware and Radio Characteristics Enabled Routing for Video Streaming over MANETs

Providing an adequate level of quality-of-experience (QoE) for multimedia applications in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is a challenging task due to its environmental characteristics, such as dynamic network topology, variable bit-rates of transmitting traffic, and fluctuating link conditions. In this paper, we propose a QoS provisioning mobility-aware and radio characteristics enabled routing for video streaming over MANETs (Q-RCNM) based routing protocol, and its multipath variant (i.e., Q-RCNMM). Our protocols ensure adequate QoE to the end users while receiving the multimedia traffic. Q-RCNM uses link-bandwidth, link-delay, and link-transmission efficiency ratio as QoS metrics along with the node mobility during its QoS-aware route discovery phase. We propose novel techniques for accurately estimating the aforementioned QoS metrics. Additionally, we design a joint analytical model that simultaneously considers the dynamic values of the aforementioned metrics to generate a single link-QoS value. Simulation results in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), delay, route throughput, transmission efficiency, and route lifetime, shows the efficiency of our proposal when compared with similar state-of-the-art techniques.

A joint energy- and QoS-aware routing mechanism for WMNs using software-defined networking paradigm

Providing energy conservation together with the quality of service (QoS) becomes more challenging in wireless mesh networks. A promising way to achieve this goal is to design a routing mechanism that takes both energy and QoS into account. On the other hand, software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm which separates the control plane from the data plane and facilitates a high level of programmability and manageability. In this paper, we propose FACOR, a novel SDN-based routing mechanism which aims at minimizing the energy consumption while providing a certain level of QoS for multimedia applications in wireless mesh networks. This technique is essentially suitable for battery-operated mesh nodes with solar panels. To obtain optimal paths, FACOR first estimates the cost of each network link using a fuzzy logic system. The fuzzy part takes parameters related to the quality of service and the energy in order to calculate the cost of the links. The routing problem is then formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) model. Since ILP is NP-complete, we propose an ant colony optimization-based algorithm to solve the model. The proposed method is implemented in the well-known OpenDayLight controller and strictly follows a modular design for the sake of efficiency. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our mechanism which achieves a gain of about 17% and 10% in terms of network lifetime and PSNR, respectively, compared to other methods.

Optical Networks for Optimized and cost effective Performance

Recently there is rapid increase of multimedia applications in the access networks. The focus of this paper is to suggest a novel system architecture that can provide efficient and cost effective solutions for the access networks. To offer economical solutions with higher bandwidth optical networks are designed with passive components. In the presented system, 512 subscribers can access information for aggregated system line rate of 80Gbps. Proposed frameworks are subjected to intensive investigation in terms of Modulation Format, External Modulator, Photo Detector so that system architectures perform at an optimized level. Also, the access network is designed without the use of reach extender devices like optical amplifier or repeater so that installation and the recurring cost are minimized.

Towards Private and Scalable Cross-Media Retrieval

Cross-media retrieval (CMR) is an attractive networked application where a server responds to queries with retrieval results of different modalities. Different from traditional information retrieval, CMR relies on a more enriched set of machine learning techniques to produce semantic models projecting multimodal data into a common space. A larger training dataset usually gives more accurate models, leading to a better retrieval result. Despite very promising with potential underpinnings in network analytics and multimedia applications, applying CMR in such contexts also faces severe privacy challenges, due to the fact that various data scattering among multiple parties may be sensitive and not allowed to be shared publicly. Studies jointly considering cross-media analytics, privacy protection, collaborative learning, and distributed networking contexts, are relatively sparse. In this work, we propose the first practical system for privacy-preserving cross-media retrieval by utilizing trusted processors. Our scheme enables secure aggregation of the data from distinct parties, and secure canonical correlation analysis (CCA) over collaborated data to obtain semantic models. Verification mechanisms are designed to defend against active attacks from a malicious adversary. Furthermore, to deal with large data sets, we provide a set of optimization methods to accomodate to limited trusted memory and improve the efficiency of training process in CMR. We consider issues such as data block splitting to manage memory overhead, ordering of operations as well as parameters reuse and release to simplify I/O, and parallel computation to speed up dual operations. Our experiments over both synthetic and real datasets show that our solution is very efficient in practice, outperforms the existing solutions, and performs comparably with the original CMR system.

A high-speed fixed width floating-point multiplier using residue logarithmic number system algorithm

The Residue Logarithmic Number System (RLNS) in digital mathematics allows multiplication and division to be performed considerably quickly and more precisely than the extensively used Floating-Point number setups. RLNS in the pitch of large scale integrated circuits, digital signal processing, multimedia, scientific computing and artificial neural network applications have Fixed Width property which has equal number of in and out bit width; hence, these applications need a Fixed Width multiplier. In this paper, a Fixed Width-Floating-Point multiplier based on RLNS was proposed to increase the processing speed. The truncation errors were reduced by using Taylor series. RLNS is the combination of both the residue number system and the logarithmic number system, and uses a table lookup including all bits for expansion. The proposed scheme is effective with regard to speed, area and power utilization in contrast to the design of conservative Floating-Point mathematics designs. Synthesis results were obtained using a Xilinx 14.7 ISE simulator. The area is 16,668 µm2, power is 37 mW, delay is 6.160 ns and truncation error can be lessened by 89% as compared with the direct-truncated multiplier. The proposed Fixed Width RLNS multiplier performs with lesser compensation error and with minimal hardware complexity, particularly as multiplier input bits increment.

CARTEE: congestion avoidance with reliable transport and energy efficiency for multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks

Reliable data transport is an essential requirement for many multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks. Actually, an efficient transport protocol for these applications must take into account not only reliability and energy consumption factors but also memory occupancy and data delivery delay. Recently, many research works have been conducted in this area, however the proposed protocols treat some of these aspects and neglect others. Contrarily, in this paper we present a novel transport solution designed to provide 100% reliability without making light of other factors. Through different mechanisms, we attempt to reach this objective with congestion avoidance and good performances in terms of energy consumption, delivery delay, and memory storage. The proposed protocol, called congestion avoidance with reliable transmission and energy efficiency (CARTEE), attains these goals through several mechanisms, namely: fixed sliding window transmission, alternative implicit/explicit acknowledgement, a new congestion detection technique, and distributed transmission rate adjustment. To evaluate the proposed protocol, we have conducted simulations using ns-3. The obtained results confirm the efficiency and scalability of CARTEE and demonstrate that it outperforms the recent proposed transport protocols in terms of reliability, congestion avoidance, data cache occupancy, and latency.

Energy and spectrum efficient mobility-aware resource management for D2D multicasting

The rapid growth of cellular traffic which is mostly due to increasing demands for multimedia and social network applications, has led to spectrum deficiency in cellular networks. Device to Device (D2D) communication is an excellent technology for offloading cellular traffic via direct communication between user equipment reusing cellular radio resources or unlicensed bands. Moreover, using D2D communication, there is a chance of reducing the energy consumption of user equipment. Multicasting is a known scenario of D2D communication which is suitable for some content sharing scenarios such as public safety services and TV broadcasting in ultra-dense networks. Efficient resource management is a challenging problem of D2D multicasting which has not been addressed adequately. This paper proposes an energy and spectrum efficient resource management method for D2D multicast communications which takes user requirements into account. In contrast to previous methods, this work also considers the mobility of user equipment in terms of the stability of possible D2D links using a mobility correlation measure. The multicast group formation and channel/power allocations have been formulated as a multi-objective optimization technique and NSGA-II has been exploited to solve the problem. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to previous methods in terms of energy and spectrum efficiency.

Novel User-Placement Ushering Mechanism to Improve Quality-of-Service for Femtocell Networks

Today, it is essential to provide the sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time mobile applications over wireless channels. Researchers have proposed a variety of solutions, thereby, including resource allocation, data scheduling, and cross-layer design, etc. However, hardly any previous study has investigated the advantage of users’ mobility. This paper proposes a novel QoS-oriented navigation approach to usher the mobile device(s) to the appropriate location, which can enable a sufficient QoS. The proposed mechanism will establish a two-dimensional geographical packet-success-rate (PSR) map, which can help to guide the mobile user(s) to locate the spot providing the QoS sufficing the application(s). With the help of the indoor positioning system and this PSR map, an innovative ushering method can be facilitated for the appropriate mobile users’ placement to reach the satisfactory QoS. The corresponding performance for our proposed scheme has been evaluated through the experiments over the femtocell network. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method to provide the sufficient QoS by ushering the user's placement for three networked multimedia applications.

P2P Live-Streaming Application-Aware Architecture for QoS Enhancement in the EPON

Managing a single state-of-the-art ethernet passive optical network optical line terminal (EPON OLT) that can support many customers with different multimedia services and quality of service (QoS) is a challenge. Peer-to-peer (P2P) live streaming is one of the most popular multimedia applications in access networks, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, which requires higher QoS, but such streaming is difficult to manage. Therefore, a new approach is required that can provide flexible control to Internet service providers (ISPs) over their networks. In this paper, we propose a P2P application-aware architecture at the OLT and optical network unit (ONU) that aims to improve overall QoS and, at the same time, preserve user-perceived quality and provide ISPs with flexible control over P2P live-streaming traffic. Finally, a new application-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation (ADBA) is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture can improve the overall QoS in terms of mean packet delay, system throughputs, and jitter, and it can also alleviate inter-ISP traffic bandwidth.