Real-time Multimedia Communication Research Articles

Multimedia Communications for Autonomous Drones

In recent years, there has been significant growth in multimedia communication on drones. The first thing that comes to every researcher’s mind is what requirements are for multimedia communication to be acceptable for existing scenarios on UAVs? Because of the noisy wireless channel and long distance between UAVs, providing reliable and real-time multimedia communications on UAVs stands at the top of the requirements list. To the best of our knowledge, mobile edge computing and cross-layer error control have significant possibilities to provide a better quality of multimedia communication on UAVs. Finally, utilizing the aforementioned edge network techniques can increase the efficiency of the overall system, enhance the video quality, maximize the usage of network resources, and save energy in multimedia communication on UAV networks.

A Survey on Web RTC Architecture

Real-time communication is a widely used technique that allows a system to communicate using peer-to-peer architecture in real-time without any transmission delays. The Internet, messaging, video chat and many more are examples of RTC. WebRTC is a standard feature for incorporating real-time multimedia communications into web browsers. WebRTC uses a range of APIs that are licensed by all successful modern browser distributors that can be found in all web and mobile browsers. Web RTC provides a secure connection as well as provides scalability with low latency. Considering the current scenario with COVID-19 there has been a rise in the usage of video conferencing in various industries like health, education for various purposes, it is also a means to enable work from home for a lot of companies.

Opis postupka tunelovanja Q signalizacije u privatnim telekomunikacionim mrežama

Introduction/purpose: The article should specify the network signaling type Q-SIG, which is standardized especially for implementation in digital telecommunication networks of integrated services (ISDN), emphasizing the possibility of its further application in the Private Telecommunications Network of Integrated Services of the Serbian Armed Forces (PISN of SAF), i.e. in the Private Automatic Telephone Network of the Serbian Armed Forces (PATN of SAF). Methods: An analysis of the existing standards was performed: ECMA355 and ECMA-336 and a synthesis of the possibilities of their application in the PATN of SAF. Results: The procedure for the application of Q-SIG is processed in a situation when the peripheral parts of the PISN of SAF, which operate on the principle of transmission and circuit switching by TDM (Time Division Multiplexing), are connected via a central Core network with the IP (Internet Protocol), which operates on the principle of packet transmission and switching with the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). A method of the application of the tunneling of encapsulated Q-SIG messages through the IP network, defined by ECMA-355 Standard, has been developed. The necessary functions for mapping the transmission of tunneled signaling messages Q-SIG and mapping voice (and other audio) information to media streams during VoIP (Voice over IP) communication through that network, which are defined by ECMA-336 Standard, are described. Conclusion: The application of ECMA-355 and ECMA-336 Standards is a new solution in the PATN of SAF with the use of the IP network to connect the IP PINX using the Q-SIG tunneling procedures and mapping functions for their transmission and transmission of audio signals. This then opens up a whole range of new possibilities that, with the growth of the Core network and their application, will rapidly contribute to the creation of a broad Telecommunication information system backbone for the implementation of real-time multimedia communications and the transition to Unified Communications (UC).

Anchor-Less Producer Mobility Management in Named Data Networking for Real-Time Multimedia

Information-centric networking (ICN) is one of the promising solutions that cater to the challenges of IP-based networking. ICN shifts the IP-based access model to a data-centric model. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a flexible ICN architecture, which is based on content distribution considering data as the core entity rather than IP-based hosts. User-generated mobile contents for real-time multimedia communication such as Internet telephony are very common these days and are increasing both in quality and quantity. In NDN, producer mobility is one of the challenging problems to support uninterrupted real-time multimedia communication and needs to be resolved for the adoption of NDN as future Internet architecture. We assert that mobile node’s future location prediction can aid in designing efficient anchor-less mobility management techniques. In this article, we show how location prediction techniques can be used to provide an anchor-less mobility management solution in order to ensure seamless handover of the producer during real-time multimedia communication. The results indicate that with a low level of location prediction accuracy, our proposed methodology still profoundly reduces the total handover latency and round trip time without creating network overhead.

From the Eye of the Storm: An IoT Ecosystem Made of Sensors, Smartphones and UAVs.

The development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) along with the ubiquity of Internet of Things (IoT) enables the creation of systems that, leveraging 5G enhancements, can provide real-time multimedia communications and data streaming. However, the usage of the UAVs introduces new constraints, such as unstable network communications and security pitfalls. In this work, the experience of implementing a system architecture for data and multimedia transmission using a multi-UAV system is presented. The system aims at creating an IoT ecosystem to bridge UAVs and other types of devices, such as smartphones and sensors, while coping with the fallback in an unstable communication environment. Furthermore, this work proposes a detailed description of a system architecture designed for remote drone fleet control. The proposed system provides an efficient, reliable and secure system for multi-UAV remote control that will offer the on-demand usage of available sensors, smartphones and unmanned vehicle infrastructure.

An image encryption algorithm based on substitution technique and chaos mixing

These recent years, countless chaos-based image encryption algorithms have been proposed to meet security needs in real time multimedia communication. However, many of these have exhibited flaws due to the chaotic map inadequacy. In this paper, we proposed a fast and secure image encryption algorithm by using new 1D chaotic systems, with better chaotic properties in the range of their control parameters. These new chaotic systems were obtained from well-known 1D chaotic maps (Logistic, May, Gaussian, Gompertz) with flaws in their chaotic properties. From the chaotic systems designed, we extracted a pseudo random number sequence (PRNS) and generated S-boxes. Then a novel technique of plain image substitution was used to enhance the sensitivity of the original image pixels, followed by a scrambling-masking technique using the generated S-box. Security tests and evaluation metrics confirmed that the proposed cryptosystem was efficient, practicable, and reliable, with high potential to be adopted for network security and secure communications because of its high encryption speed.

Autonomous multimedia cluster computing based on Cooperative Cognition data behavior measurement under multi cloud computing

In order to meet the needs of multimedia communication in multi cloud environment and improve the experience quality of mobile multimedia users, based on multi cloud computing, based on Cooperative cognitive data behavior measurement, this paper proposes an autonomous multimedia cluster computer system and its architecture. First of all, dispersed edge clouds are distributed and integrated, and cooperate to provide multimedia storage and computing functions. In cloudy environment, a hierarchical access service point is designed between edge cloud and core cloud. On this basis, a multimedia cluster computing system suitable for cloudy environment is built. Secondly, a mulch-dimensional mapping mechanism is built between the link management interface array and the task scheduling array in the edge cloud array. Mulch-dimensional multimedia data and real-time task scheduling cooperation cognition, and core cloud are used to interact with DP vectors with dedicated channels. On this basis, we propose an autonomous computer system based on Cooperative Cognition and multimedia data behavior measure. Finally, it is analyzed by three groups of experiments. The resource utilization of the multimedia cluster computing system, the behavior measurement accuracy based on the cooperative cognitive multimedia data behavior measure and the performance of the proposed autonomous multimedia cluster computing (AMC-CCC) in large-scale real-time multimedia communication applications. The results show that the proposed AMC-CCC mechanism has excellent performance in multimedia QoS, resource management and data behavior measurement.

Bandwidth Reservation Strategies for Scheduling Maximization in Dedicated Networks

Bandwidth reservation has been increasingly used in high-performance networks to provide quality of service for various applications ranging from real-time multimedia communication in early years to big data transfer more recently. In this paper, we consider multiple bandwidth reservation requests in a batch awaiting to be scheduled in a dedicated network, and formulate two scheduling maximization problems: 1) maximize the amount of data to be transferred and 2) maximize the number of requests to be scheduled. We prove both problems are NP-complete and very difficult to approximate. We then design two heuristic algorithms and evaluate their performance against a scheduling algorithm widely used in real production networks through extensive simulation-based experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms achieve significantly better overall scheduling performance than the existing algorithm.

A Telerehabilitation System for the Selection, Evaluation and Remote Management of Therapies.

Telerehabilitation systems that support physical therapy sessions anywhere can help save healthcare costs while also improving the quality of life of the users that need rehabilitation. The main contribution of this paper is to present, as a whole, all the features supported by the innovative Kinect-based Telerehabilitation System (KiReS). In addition to the functionalities provided by current systems, it handles two new ones that could be incorporated into them, in order to give a step forward towards a new generation of telerehabilitation systems. The knowledge extraction functionality handles knowledge about the physical therapy record of patients and treatment protocols described in an ontology, named TrhOnt, to select the adequate exercises for the rehabilitation of patients. The teleimmersion functionality provides a convenient, effective and user-friendly experience when performing the telerehabilitation, through a two-way real-time multimedia communication. The ontology contains about 2300 classes and 100 properties, and the system allows a reliable transmission of Kinect video depth, audio and skeleton data, being able to adapt to various network conditions. Moreover, the system has been tested with patients who suffered from shoulder disorders or total hip replacement.

Cross‐layer source‐channel control for future wireless multimedia services: energy, latency, and quality investigation

Efficient use of available energy resources for real-time multimedia communication with a quality guarantee is one of the main challenges for future mobile computing systems. To meet the high quality-of-experience (QoE) demand of multimedia services, we propose a novel quality-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC) scheme with an unequal error protection (UEP) technique that allocates bits by optimising source intra refreshing rates and channel correction coding rates. The key contribution of this work is that the frame importance diversity at the application layer is jointly considered with the error correction techniques and resource constraints at lower layers. For any given bit budget, the JSCC model is capable of allocating adaptive bits between source coding and channel coding among media streams. The source-aware UEP scheme is capable of dynamically allocating the error correction bits among frames, achieving the maximum overall QoE. Simulation results demonstrated that significant improvement in multimedia quality and remarkable energy/time conservation can be achieved by deploying the proposed group-based JSCC strategy, although the complexity is limited.

Guest Editorial Multimedia Communication in the Internet of Things

Multimedia communication in the Internet of Things (IoT) can potentially reach into a vast array of areas and touch people’s lives in profound and different ways. For example, real-time multimedia communication could be applied in the current U.S. 911 system to provide responders with detailed information about the nature and severity of an incident before they arrive on the scene, if the callers can transmit image and/or video of the incident site. City governments can also allow citizens to report traffic and road conditions by uploading real-time multimedia data via a specific smartphone app.

Real Time Communications in the Web: Current Achievements and Future Perspectives

The articles in this special section focus on the creation of real-time communication between web browsers via communication standards. These initiatives involve both the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The IETF has focused its work on the architecture and on-the-wire protocols, identifying the state information and the events that need to be available to developers, while the W3C worked on application-level JavaScript APIs to be offered to developers in order to allow them to easily implement interoperable real-time multimedia applications in the web. Back in 2011, the IETF chartered the “Real-Time Communication in WEB-browsers” (RTCWEB) Working Group, with the aim of defining an architecture and a complete suite of protocols for the support of real-time multimedia communications directly between browsers. The RTCWEB WG has since worked on key aspects like the overall communication infrastructure, the protocols and API (Application Programming Interface) requirements, the security model, the media formats (and related media codecs), as well as advanced functionality like congestion/flow control and interworking with legacy VoIP equipment. In parallel, the W3C has developed a set of APIs exposing functions like exploration and access to device capabilities, capture of media from local devices, encoding/processing of “media streams,” establishment of peer-to-peer connections between browsers (and web-enabled devices in general), decoding/processing of incoming media streams and delivery of such streams to the end-user in an HTML5-compliant fashion.

Designing and evaluating the usability of an API for real-time multimedia services in the Internet

In the last few years, multimedia technologies in general, and Real-Time multimedia Communications (RTC) in particular, are becoming mainstream among WWW and smartphone developers, who have an increasing interest in richer media capabilities for creating their applications. The engineering literature proposing novel algorithms, protocols and architectures for managing and processing multimedia information is currently overwhelming. However, most of these results do not arrive to applications due to the lack of simple and usable APIs. Interestingly, in this context in which APIs are the critical ingredient for reaching wide developer audiences, the scientific literature about multimedia APIs and their usability is scarce. In this paper we try to contribute to fill this gap by proposing the RTC Media API: a novel type of API designed with the aim of making simple for developers the use of latest trends in RTC multimedia including WebRTC, Video Content Analysis or Augmented Reality. We provide a specification of such API and discuss how it satisfies a set of design requirements including programming-language agnosticism, adaptation to cloud environments, support to multisensory multimedia, etc. After that, we describe an implementation of such an API that has been created in the context of the Kurento open source software project, and present a study evaluating the API usability performed in a group of more than 40 professional developers distributed worldwide. In the light of the obtained results, we conclude that the usability of the API is adequate across the main development activities (i.e. API learning, code creation and code maintenance), with an average usability score of 3.39 over 5 in a Likert scale, and that this result is robust with respect to developers' profiles, cultures, professional experiences and preferred programming languages.

A network-assisted flow mobility architecture for optimized mobile medical multimedia transmission

A large part of mobile Health (mHealth) use-cases such as remote patient monitoring/diagnosis, teleconsultation, and guided surgical intervention requires advanced and reliable mobile communication solutions to provide efficient multimedia transmission with strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. The increasing deployment of overlapping wireless access networks enables the possibility to offer the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth services. To address the challenges and support the above use-cases in today’s heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments, we propose a network-assisted flow-based mobility management architecture for optimized real-time mobile medical multimedia communication. The proposed system is empirically evaluated in a Pan-European HetNet testbed with multi-access Android-based mobile devices. We observed that the proposed scheme significantly improves the objective QoE of simultaneous real-time high-resolution electrocardiography and high-definition ultrasound transmissions while also enhances traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.

Energy efficient multiconstrained optimization using hybrid ACO and GA in MANET routing

Nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) suffer from limited battery power and bandwidth. Particularly for real time multimedia communications through MANET, metrics like residual node energy, bandwidth, and end-to-end delay have major impacts. In MANET, designing a dynamic routing algorithm to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements is a challenging task. Additionally, multiconstrained QoS routing aims to optimize multiple QoS metrics while providing required network resources and is an admittedly complex problem. It has been proved to be NP-complete when a combination of additive, concave, and multiplicative metrics are considered. Hence, this problem can be solved using metaheuristic methods like ant colony optimization (ACO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed energy-efficient ACO GA hybrid metaheuristic approach aims to utilize the benefits of both as a combined approach in order to reduce the routing complexities in the dynamic environment. After due investigation, it has been shown that the proposed hybrid approach improves the performance of MANET routing with satisfied QoS requirements.

Real-time multimedia communications in medical emergency - the CONCERTO project solution.

The management of medical emergency, in particular cardiac emergency, requests prompt intervention and the possibility to communicate in real time from the emergency area / ambulance to the hospital as much diagnostic information as possible about the patient. This would enable a prompt emergency diagnosis and operation and the possibility to prepare the appropriate actions in the suitable hospital department. To address this scenario, the CONCERTO European project proposed a wireless communication system based on a novel cross-layer architecture, including the integration of building blocks for medical media content fusion, delivery and access. This paper describes the proposed system architecture, outlining the developed components and mechanisms, and the evaluation of the proposed system, carried out in a hospital with the support of medical staff. The technical results and the feedback received highlight the impact of the CONCERTO approach in the healthcare domain, in particular in enabling a prompt and reliable diagnosis in challenging medical emergency scenarios.

Resilient overlay network for real-time interactive multimedia sessions in corporate networks

Real-time interactive multimedia communications are becoming increasingly useful for education, business, e-commerce and e-government, providing an enriched user experience in teleconferencing, e-meetings, distance training and product demonstrations. Large corporations are usually located at several sites, so real-time multipoint sessions within corporations are especially difficult. IP multicast is available or feasible within each site of an organization. Thus, corporate networks can be considered as various multicast-capable networks interconnected through a wide area network without multicast connectivity. This paper proposes a resilient self-managed overlay network to support real-time multipoint interactive sessions within corporate networks. The proposed overlay takes advantage of the configuration of corporate networks to self-organize and provide an efficient media delivery service, making use of multicast communications wherever available. Various self-healing techniques are implemented allowing for the continuity of ongoing sessions in spite of network disruptions and entity failures. Extensive simulations and tests have been carried out to assess the performance and resilience of the overlay facing several types of disruptions.

Improvement on LEACH Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have great potential to support several important wireless applications, including real-time multimedia communication, medical applications, surveillance using sensor networks, industrial applications, military surveillance and home networking applications. But there are two challenging issues (i) communication bandwidth and (ii) energy are very important to design wireless and mobile systems because these are very much limited in network environment. Therefore it requires intelligent communication and design techniques to increase bandwidth as well as energy efficient protocol. The most efficient routing protocol LEACH (Lower Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been incorporated by Heinzelman et.al. LEACH uses the concept of dynamic clustering when sensor nodes are deploying randomly where number of cluster impact on the network. This paper describes the network quality that depends on different characteristics of data transmission as a Modification on LEACH protocol. In this paper, we discussed and explain the comparison of magnitude, phase, phase delay, group delay, amplitude of broadcasting and energy consumption respectively.

Survey of various routing approaches based on quality-of-service (QoS) criteria in MANET

Now a day, Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANET) gained a lot of popularity in the research community. People realized that there is a commercial value in MANETs with the successful solutions of the most basic but important problems in network layer. Mostly all the applications that attracted interest in traditional wired networks (e.g. Audio/Video Transfer, Video Conferencing, Watching Online Movies/Sports, Camera-enabled Messenger, Online Gaming etc.) would attract interest for MANETs as well. Since real-time multimedia communications will be common in MANETs, there has been an increasing motivation on the introduction of QoS in such networks. But, many characteristics of MANETs make QoS provisioning a difficult problem. In MANETs, providing QoS guarantees is very difficult and challenging than in traditional wired networks, mainly due to multihop communications, contention for channel access, node mobility and a lack of central coordination. However, in the last few years, much research attention has focused on providing QoS guarantees in MANET routing protocols. QoS routing protocol/mechanism is key issue in provision of QoS in MANETs. There are number of QoS routing approaches have been proposed in literature, focusing on different QoS metrics but no particular protocol/mechanism provides overall solution. There are some major open research issues in this area such as QoS metric selection and cost function design, Multi-class traffic, Scheduling mechanism at source, Packet prioritization for control messages, QoS routing that allows preemption, and QoS in Heterogeneous networks. There are still many open questions that must be solved to improve the performance of QoS-aware routing protocols such as bandwidth/delay estimation, route discovery, resource reservation, route maintenance, cross-layer design, energy consumption, multicast QoS routing etc.

Optimal-constrained multicast sub-graph over coded packet networks

Network coding is a technique which can be used to improve the performance of multicast communications by performing encoding operations at intermediate nodes. In real-time multimedia communication applications, there are usually several weights associated with links, such as cost, delay, jitter, loss ratio, security, and so on. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding an optimal multicast sub-graph over coded packet networks, where the longest end-to-end weight from the source to each destination does not exceed an upper bound. First, a mixed integer programming model is proposed to formulate the problem which is NP-hard. Then, a column-generation approach is described for this problem, in which the problem is decomposed into a master linear programming problem and several integer programming sub-problems. Moreover, two methods based on linear and Lagrangian relaxation are proposed to compute a tight lower bound of the optimal solution value. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm provides an efficient way for solving the problem, even for relatively large networks.