Provide Multimedia Services Research Articles

Dual server based security system for multimedia Services in Next Generation Networks

Next Generation Networks (NGN) provide multimedia services to a large set of users by maintaining concurrent sessions for multimedia services using IP multimedia sub-system (IMS). SIP protocol are used for building, keeping and detaching session with clients. The main problem is that intruders can launch SIP flooding attacks that cause a bottleneck at IMS entities. In this paper, we have presented a Dual Server based Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (DS-IDPS) to guard against INVITE flooding attack. We have proposed two-level security for VoLTE environment by involving two servers titled helper and main servers to handle spoofing and attack detection respectively. We have defined three thresholds at main server by utilizing CUSUM algorithm to generate alarms by detecting intrusion. By attaching DS-IDPS at the middle of client and server, our system filters every request. We have developed a test bed using OpenIMS to develop IMS entities and launch attacks by malicious nodes and detect the intrusion in the system. It reduces CPU load and memory stack from P--CSCF. Results prove that DS-IDPS produces lesser false alarms and detect more number of malicious or bogus requests. Our proposed approach dominates as compared to preliminaries in terms of memory utilization, response time, malicious requests recognition ratios and CPU load consumption.

Stochastic Optimization for Green Multimedia Services in Dense 5G Networks

The manyfold capacity magnification promised by dense 5G networks will make possible the provisioning of broadband multimedia services, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and mobile immersive video, to name a few. These new applications will coexist with classic ones and contribute to the exponential growth of multimedia services in mobile networks. At the same time, the different requirements of past and old services pose new challenges to the effective usage of 5G resources. In response to these challenges, a novel Stochastic Optimization framework for Green Multimedia Services named SOGMS is proposed herein that targets the maximization of system throughput and the minimization of energy consumption in data delivery. In particular, Lyapunov optimization is leveraged to face this optimization objective, which is formulated and decomposed into three tractable subproblems. For each subproblem, a distinct algorithm is conceived, namely quality of experience--based admission control, cooperative resource allocation, and multimedia services scheduling. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the proposed method against state-of-art solutions in dense 5G networks.

No-reference artifacts measurements based video quality metric

In multimedia delivery, perceived quality of video signal has a significant role in overall users Quality of Experience (QoE). Therefore, multimedia service providers must constantly measure and monitor perceived video quality, which is usually performed using no-reference (NR) video quality metrics. In this paper, a novel NR objective video quality metric named Artifacts Measurements Based Video Quality Metric (AMB-VQM) is proposed. In addition to artifacts measures computed by blocking (BL), packet-loss (PL), and freezing (FZ) artifacts detection algorithms, the metric incorporates artifacts masking based on spatial and temporal video content complexity. Furthermore, a newly created FERIT-RTRK-2 video quality database, which contains 486 Full HD test video sequences impaired by video compression (MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, and H.265), packet-loss, frame freezing, and combinations of these procedures, is presented in this paper. FERIT-RTRK-2 database is publicly available for scientific community at http://www.rt-rk.com/other/VideoDBReadme.html. Additionally, newly created user-friendly subjective video quality assessment tool with graphical user interface, which can be used for conducting of subjective video quality experiments, is presented. In experimental part the performance of the proposed AMB-VQM is compared to this of 10 other objective video quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, VSNR, PSNRHVS, PSNRHVSM, VIFP, ViS3, ST-MAD, BRISQUE, VIIDEO) using distorted video sequences from four different video quality databases: CSIQ, LIVE, FERIT-RTRK and FERIT-RTRK-2. The results show that AMB-VQM achieves high performance when predicting the video quality for videos distorted in different manners. AMB-VQM results outperform the results of most of the analyzed popular and very often used video quality metrics.

Guest Editorial Multimedia Economics for Future Networks: Theory, Methods, and Applications

With the growing integration of telecommunication networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G networks, there is a tremendous demand for multimedia services over heterogeneous networks. According to recent survey reports, mobile video traffic accounted for 60 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2016, and it will reach up to 78 percent by the end of 2021. Users’ daily lives are inundated with multimedia services, such as online video streaming (e.g., YouTube and Netflix), social networks (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), IoT and machine generated video (e.g, surveillance cameras), and multimedia service providers (e.g., Over-the-Top (OTT) services). Multimedia data is thus becoming the dominant traffic in the near future for both wired and wireless networks.

Power Rationing for Tradeoff Between Energy Consumption and Profit in Multimedia Heterogeneous Networks

With the explosive growth of multimedia applications, heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) are widely deployed to meet the increasingly impressing demands on communication capacity. However, supporting the massive real-time traffic generated by always-on multimedia applications in HetNets causes enormous energy consumptions. The tradeoff between energy consumptions and profits of service providers while maintaining satisfied quality-of-service (QoS) has become a significant objective. To this end, this paper proposes a novel framework of power rationing in HetNets to achieve maximal profit and guaranteed service performance. A dynamic power rationing strategy that employs Tullock contest is developed to model the power control of multiple cells into a game and solve the contradiction of profits and energy consumption as the tradeoff between QoS and cost. Two principal challenges in gaming, incomplete information, and the curse of dimensionality are resolved by the designed virtual repeated game that adopts the Monte-Carlo method and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain the Nash equilibrium. The equilibrium of power rationing balances the energy consumptions and profits of cells, which ensures the optimal solution for the multimedia service providers and HetNets operators. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed model can serve as an efficient tool for power rationing in multimedia HetNets.

PPHA-Popularity Prediction Based High Data Availability for Multimedia Data Center

Due to the growth of internet-connected devices and extensive data analysis applications in recent years, cloud computing systems are largely utilized. Because of high utilization of cloud storage systems, the demand for data center management has been increased. There are several crucial requirements of data center management, such as increase data availability, enhance durability, and decrease latency. In previous works, a replication technique is mostly used to answer those needs according to consistency requirements. However, most of the works consider full data, popular data, and geo-distance-based replications by considering storage and replication cost. Moreover, the previous data popularity based-techniques rely on the historical and current data access frequencies for replication. In this article, the authors approach this problem from a distinct aspect while developing replication techniques for a multimedia data center management system which can dynamically adapt servers of a data center by considering popularity prediction in each data access location. Therefore, they first label data objects from one to ten to track access frequencies of data objects. Then, they use those data access frequencies from each location to predict the future access frequencies of data objects to determine the replication levels and locations to replicate the data objects, and store the related data objects to close storage servers. To show the efficiency of the proposed methods, the authors conduct an extensive simulation by using real data. The results show that the proposed method has an advantage over the previous works in terms of data availability and increases the data availability up to 50%. The proposed method and related analysis can assist multimedia service providers to enhance their service qualities.

Survey on cooperatively V2X downloading for intelligent transport systems

Energy conservation has always been crucial issues faced by the development of academia and the automotive industry. Traditional cellular networks cannot meet people's needs for video, large files and entertainment. To tackle these problems, cooperatively vehicles-to-everything (V2X) downloading is a typical solution of driving experience, which is in line with the trend of automobile development. Cooperative downloading can better achieve energy efficiency, low-emission and resource sharing. Using cooperative vehicles to download files for intelligent transport systems (ITS) is attracting increasing attention. The future commercial potential is unlimited and a win-win situation is achieved. One of the key challenges in building cooperative downloading today is the provisioning of multimedia services requiring actuator algorithm, intermittent connectivity and real-time computation. This survey summarises recent efforts of the key technologies, routing protocols and incentives mechanism in cooperative downloading.

Providing multicast services over SDN-evolved LTE network: Architecture, procedures and performance analysis

The recent innovation in cellular technologies like LTE/LTE-Advanced has increased the demand of high bandwidth services e.g. mobile Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), on-demand video streaming etc. However, current cellular multicast service called Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) is not enough in terms of IPTV service provisioning, flexibility, and efficiency. Software-defined networking (SDN) being an emerging networking paradigm offers its services to program such cellular networks, providing a remotely configurable forwarding plane. This paper enlightens the notion of SDN in cellular multicast data transmission within eMBMS networks. It presents an objective sketch of transforming current multicast cellular communication into OpenFlow based SDN-evolved communication. We perform the first fine-grained analysis of common multicast procedures (group join, handover etc.) involved in both the current and SDN-evolved eMBMS network along with the supporting simulation results while providing multimedia services to the users. Considering user plurality of multicast services, we model the user requests as independent events of a Zipf-like distribution and find out the correlation among multimedia content popularity, operational load on the network and delay metrics. This paper provides a comparison of both the networks, summarizes the significant differences between the two, and highlights the effectiveness of our proposed SDN-evolved multicast approach in terms of minimized network operations, reduced delays, reliable and streamlined multicast tree construction.

Editorial

This first issue of 2018 is a significant expansion of the number of pages for our journal to continue to reduce the backlog of papers published in the IEEE Xplore as advance posting, but not yet physically included in an issue. This is an extraordinary effort of the IEEE Systems Council to better serve our scientific, technical, and professional community. The first part contains three guest editorials for special issues that appeared in the fourth issue of 2017. By mistake, they were not included with the respective papers. The first guest editorial is the one for the special issue on "Traffic Forensics: Systems, Tools, and Experimentations,” whose Guest Editors are Y.-D. Lin, Y.-C. Lai, G. Kesidis, and A. V. Vasilakos. The second one is for the special issue on "Visual Signal Applications Over Networks," whose GuestEditors are H.-C. Chao, L. Zhou, C. Xu, and P. Lorenz. The third guest editorial is the one for the special issue on "Multimedia Services Provision Over Future Mobile Computing Systems," whose Guest Editors are G. Mastorakis, E. Pallis, C.X. Mavromoustakis, L. Shu, and J.J.P.C. Rodrigues. The second part consists of the special issue on "Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart systems," whose Guest Editors are S. Ullah, W. Pedrycz, G.K. Karagiannidis, H.-C. Chao, A. Gacek, and C. Verikoukis. The third part collects papers on various aspects of complex systems, systems of systems, communications, power, and energy. Papers address various topics encompassing theory, technologies, design methodologies, and applications.

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Multimedia Services Provision Over Future Mobile Computing Systems

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Multimedia Services Provision Over Future Mobile Computing Systems

GrIMS: Green Information-Centric Multimedia Streaming Framework in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Information-centric networking (ICN), as a novel network paradigm, is expected to natively support mobility, multicast, and multihoming in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In this paper, the adoption of ICN principles for multimedia streaming in multihomed VANETs is investigated, with a major emphasis on the tradeoff between the quality of experience and energy efficiency (EnE). To formalize this problem, a cost optimization model is first proposed, based on queueing theory arguments. Then, a novel green information-centric multimedia streaming (GrIMS) framework is designed to drive the system toward optimal working points in practical settings. GrIMS consists of three enhanced mechanisms for on-demand cloud-based processing, adaptive multipath transmission, and cooperative in-network caching. Finally, a massive simulation campaign has been carried out, demonstrating that, thanks to its core components, the GrIMS enables flexible multimedia service provisioning and achieves an improved performance in terms of start-up delay, playbacks continuity, and EnE with respect to state-of-the-art solutions.

The Effectiveness NGN/IMS Networks in the Establishment of a Multimedia Session

The subject of the study is multiservice communication network using the concept NGN (Next Generation Network) based on the open network architecture IMS (Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem), supporting a wide range of services. The basis of this architecture is the IMS core, consisting of a set of specialized modules responsible for various functions for customer service. The purpose of the article is to analyze the existing technical capabilities of the IMS multimedia messaging subsystem and perspective solutions for the functioning of the NGN/IMS network efficiency in providing multimedia services. The effectiveness NGN/IMS networks during the establishment of a multimedia session was analyzed and the functional architecture of the IMS multimedia messaging subsystem that determine the interaction of NGN signaling systems an protocols was explored. One of the important requirements for the IMS subsystem is the maintenance QoS (Quality of Service). A mathematical model for estimating the quality of communication services using a system <i>GI</i>/<i>G</i>/1/<i>N_6H</i> based on the theory of diffusion approximation is proposed. On the basis of the model analytical expressions are obtained, which allow evaluating the performance indicators of the Triple Play service.

Smart resource allocation for improving QoE in IP Multimedia Subsystems

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a robust multimedia service. IMS becomes more important when delivering multimedia services. Multimedia service providers can benefit from IMS to ensure a good QoE (Quality of Experience) to their customers with minimal resources usage. In this paper, we propose an intelligent media distribution IMS system architecture for delivering video streaming. The system is based primarily on uploading a multimedia file to a server in the IMS. Later, other users can download the uploaded multimedia file from the IMS. In the system, we also provide the design of the heuristic decision methods and models based on probability distributions. Thus, our system takes into account the network parameters such as bandwidth, jitter, delay and packet loss that influence the QoE of the end-users. Moreover, we have considered the other parameters of the energy consumption such as CPU, RAM, temperature and number connected users that impact the result of the QoE. All these parameters are considered as input to our proposal management system. The measurements taken from the real test bench show the real performance and demonstrate the success of the system about ensuring the upload speed of the multimedia file, guaranteeing the QoE of end users and improving the energy efficiency of the IMS.

Transient Analysis of Idle Time in VANETs Using Markov-Reward Models

The development of analytical models to analyze the behavior of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a challenging aim. Adaptive methods are suitable for many algorithms (e.g., choice of forwarding paths, dynamic resource allocation, channel control congestion) and services (e.g., provision of multimedia services, message dissemination). These adaptive algorithms help the network to maintain a desired performance level. However, this is a difficult goal to achieve, especially in VANETs due to fast position changes of the VANET nodes. Adaptive decisions should be taken according to the current conditions of the VANET. Therefore, evaluation of transient measures is required for the characterization of VANETs. In the literature, different works address the characterization and measurement of the idle (or busy) time to be used in different proposals to attain a more efficient usage of wireless network. This paper focuses on the idle time of the link between two VANET nodes, which we denote as Tidle. Specifically, we have developed an analytical model based on a straightforward Markov reward chain to obtain transient measurements of Tidle. Numerical results from the analytical model fit well with simulation results.

Network flow analysis for detection and mitigation of Fraudulent Resource Consumption (FRC) attacks in multimedia cloud computing

Multimedia computing has evolved as a remarkable technology which provides services to view, create, edit, process, and search multimedia contents. All these multimedia services have high computational, bandwidth, and storage requirements. Therefore, multimedia cloud computing has gained appreciable popularity and acceptance in the past one decade. The convenience of cloud computing comes with financial burden. One of the fundamental features of cloud computing, which helps in reducing the financial worries of the multimedia service providers is the cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model. However, the cloud’s pricing model has also attracted adversaries that have hindered the migration of services and/or data by various organisations to the cloud. Through the cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, attackers usually target the financial viability of the cloud customers. Therefore, such attacks are capable to affect the long term availability of multimedia-services hosted on the public cloud. These attacks are known as Fraudulent Resource Consumption (FRC) attack. Therefore, research in the area of FRC attack detection and mitigation is important in motivating the organisations to adopt the public cloud platform. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on network flow analysis at the victim side to detect and mitigate the FRC attacks against cloud-based services. Experiments were conducted using real world benchmark datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Experimental outcomes suggest that our proposed approach is able to detect and mitigate the FRC attacks with satisfactory accuracy and low overhead.

Scheduling multimedia services in cloud computing environment

ABSTRACTCurrently, security is a critical factor for multimedia services running in the cloud computing environment. As an effective mechanism, trust can improve security level and mitigate attacks within cloud computing environments. Unfortunately, existing scheduling strategy for multimedia service in the cloud computing environment do not integrate trust mechanism when making scheduling decisions. In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme for multimedia services in multi clouds. At first, a novel scheduling architecture is presented. Then, We build a trust model including both subjective trust and objective trust to evaluate the trust degree of multimedia service providers. By employing Bayesian theory, the subjective trust degree between multimedia service providers and users is obtained. According to the attributes of QoS, the objective trust degree of multimedia service providers is calculated. Finally, a scheduling algorithm integrating trust of entities is proposed by considering the deadline, cost and trust requirements of multimedia services. The scheduling algorithm heuristically hunts for reasonable resource allocations and satisfies the requirement of trust and meets deadlines for the multimedia services. Detailed simulated experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed trust scheduling scheme.

Distributed hybrid cloud for profit driven content provisioning using user requirements and content popularity

Growing use of internet turn people to use hand held devices such as smart phone to download/view the multimedia contents at any time with more flexibility. Due to limited resources of handheld devices, multimedia content handling becomes more complex task which can be resolved by using the popular field called cloud computing. The resource handling can be optimized by maintaining both private (permanent storage) and public (temporary and emergency storage) clouds, so that user can respond with required multimedia contents without interruption. However the multimedia provisioning such as video, audio and games downloading through cloud affects the profit of both cloud users and cloud providers if it is not handled with more concern. This problem is resolved in the proposed research methodology by constructing the novel frameworks that can leads to profit aware multimedia contents handling. In the proposed research work, profit of multimedia cloud service providers are increased by constructing the user profile that includes information about user services using kernel support vector machine, so that resource utilization can be optimized in case of current resource failure. And then scheduling and rescheduling of multimedia contents storage level is done by using the Fast Quadratic Lyapunov Algorithms in different time granularities. Finally, popularity based cache management is introduced to reduce the unwanted cost wastage while downloading same multimedia content multiple time. The overall results of the work is simulated in the multimedia cloud environment and it is proved that the proposed research methodology tends to provide profit aware multimedia provisioning to the cloud users with increased performance.

Design of efficient shape feature for object-based watermarking technology

The accelerated development of IT technologies on the Internet for fast provision of commercial multimedia services has stimulated an urgent demand for reliable and secure copyright protection for digital multimedia. Also, information retrieval is required to search valuable information from wide range of image data for various applications such as biometrics, crime prevention, health informatics, and image search. We proposes the shape representation method using angles, orientations, and locations which is called as Oriented Angular Keypoints (OAK) to make help for shape-based watermarking scheme. First, the contour is extracted from input image and is divided into contour blocks. Then, angles and directions from the divided contour blocks are computed to make unique feature. To evaluate the proposed image retrieval algorithm, commonly employed datasets of Gorelick and MPEG-7 are also used in this paper. The performance of the similarity measure that proposed image retrieval algorithm achieves improvement of about 10 % compared with Shape Context in terms of Bull’s eye score.

An improved and secure chaotic map based authenticated key agreement in multi-server architecture

Multi-Server Authentication (MSA) provides the user an efficient way to avail multiple services of various multimedia service providers, once after getting registered from a registration centre. Previously, a user had to register all servers individually to use their respective service; which proves to be a redundant and inefficient procedure in comparison with MSA. Many MSA-based techniques have been put forward by researchers, so far, however with proven pitfalls. In the last few years, the focus has been shifted towards a more flexible and efficient Chebyshev cryptographic technique. In this regard, recently Tan’s scheme presented a chaotic map based multi-server authentication scheme with a focus on login scalability. Nonetheless, Tan’s scheme has been found vulnerable to insider (impersonation attack) and stolen smart card attacks. Besides, the Tan’s scheme fails to differentiate the login requests between the two presented cases. The current study work is based on improving the Tan’s technique in terms of security in almost an equivalent cost. The security for proposed work is evaluated in the performance evaluation section, while it shows that the security is provable under formal security model, as well as using BAN Logic.

Performance Evaluation of LTE based System Parameters using OFDM in Indoor and Outdoor Environment

Background/Objectives: OFDM is a wireless broad band technology employed in 4G wireless system. OFDM is the Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) modulation technique used for sending a group of signals simultaneously over a channel. OFDM divides the signal into a number of narrow signals which are sent at various frequencies to the receiver. Method/Analysis: Long Term Evolution is a 4G technology used for both indoor and outdoor environments. LTE is able to produce higher data output rates and reduce the cost of delivering a megabyte of data. The outside sources of interference, design and configuration of the LTE network may reduce the spectrum efficiency and results in low data output rates for users and high costs for network operators. LTE will be deployed to provide multimedia services for mobile and portable scenarios. Findings/Applications: This paper concentrates on correlating SNR to the performance of LTE in indoor and outdoor environments. An average throughput and a consistent performance are observed more frequently in outdoor areas when compared to indoor areas. A comparison of indoor and outdoor parameters is shown by simulating in MATLAB.