Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major Telecomunicação). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

Demands for multimedia content, one form of digital content, are continuously increasing at a phenomenal pace, as video features are commonly available on personal devices, such as iPod, cell phone, laptop, PDA, and Blackberry. The streaming service poses unique bandwidth and delay challenges to application designers. The size of a typical video content is usually orders of magnitude larger than that of any other type of content, resulting in high demands for bandwidth contribution from the content providers. Even more challenging, the content must be delivered to end hosts in real time to maintain smooth playback, i.e., the content must be transmitted at a satisfactory rate. In this thesis, we present our research towards a high-quality peer-to-peer live streaming system that utilizes network coding, a novel technique that permits coding at every peer, which has proven benefits in file dissemination applications. To ensure the practicality of our work, it is our imperative objective to conduct all experiments under realistic settings.

Demands for multimedia content, one form of digital content, are continuously increasing at a phenomenal pace, as video features are commonly available on personal devices, such as iPod, cell phone, laptop, PDA, and Blackberry. The streaming service poses unique bandwidth and delay challenges to application designers. The size of a typical video content is usually orders of magnitude larger than that of any other type of content, resulting in high demands for bandwidth contribution from the content providers. Even more challenging, the content must be delivered to end hosts in real time to maintain smooth playback, i.e., the content must be transmitted at a satisfactory rate. In this thesis, we present our research towards a high-quality peer-to-peer live streaming system that utilizes network coding, a novel technique that permits coding at every peer, which has proven benefits in file dissemination applications. To ensure the practicality of our work, it is our imperative objective to conduct all experiments under realistic settings.

With the increasing demand on multimedia applications over the Internet, and the growing number of mobile smart devices people are using, it is helpful to develop a mobile network architecture that can support multimedia transmission without using infrastructures. We propose that service overlay networks over MANETs can serve as a supplement to the existing 3G/4G networks and Wi-Fi access point networks. In this thesis we present experiment results that show the feasibility of mobile service overlay networks to meet the requirements of multimedia streaming. And also, we improved one of the existing overlay protocols. The improved protocol takes physical location into consideration when establishing connections in the overlay network. It also limits the number of neighbors each node can have, which prevents a particular node from becoming the bottleneck of the network, when connected to too many neighbors. Evaluation results show the new protocol reduces network packet loss rate.

With the increasing demand on multimedia applications over the Internet, and the growing number of mobile smart devices people are using, it is helpful to develop a mobile network architecture that can support multimedia transmission without using infrastructures. We propose that service overlay networks over MANETs can serve as a supplement to the existing 3G/4G networks and Wi-Fi access point networks. In this thesis we present experiment results that show the feasibility of mobile service overlay networks to meet the requirements of multimedia streaming. And also, we improved one of the existing overlay protocols. The improved protocol takes physical location into consideration when establishing connections in the overlay network. It also limits the number of neighbors each node can have, which prevents a particular node from becoming the bottleneck of the network, when connected to too many neighbors. Evaluation results show the new protocol reduces network packet loss rate.

There are two main purposes of this thesis. The first one is to get a better understanding of the aspects affecting customers’ loyalty in the telecommunication industry, in the context of when customers are using the services. The second purpose is to look into what the case company gains by having customers that are more loyal, where the degree of loyalty is measured by the Net Promoter Score metric. The methodology used to carry out the research is a case study with an approach that is both qualitative and quantitative. Where the quantitative approach has the largest share. Two datasets have been used in this thesis, one collected by the authors by sending out surveys and one collected beforehand at the case company. The survey created by the authors aim to let customers assess the satisfaction level with technical and non-technical aspects that can affect loyalty. The dataset that is already collected by the case company document the initial degree of loyalty of customers along with the revenue per customers over a period of years. The two datasets are used for the two different research purposes respectively. The statistical analysis for the data is conducted using the statistical tool Minitab. The findings for the first purpose are that our survey questions can be split into three categories using factor analysis. The categories are Perceived mobile multimedia quality, Perceived broadband multimedia quality and General perceptions. The first two categories are driving customer loyalty and the third category are indicators of customer loyalty. For the second purpose the findings are that the case company has different gains of more loyal customers depending on if the customers are either mobile or broadband customers. More loyal mobile customers stay longer as customers and also buy more. More loyal broadband customers only stay longer as customers. The practical implications of the findings are that the case company has to think of customer loyalty in new ways. There are more indicators of if a customer is loyal than the Net Promoter Score, these are for example customer satisfaction, perceived brand value, perceived overall quality, perceived customization etc. Therefore it would be better to measure customer loyalty not only with the Net Promoter Score Metric but to pick out 2-3 indicators to ask the customer and create an average index for all the questions that can represent the customers’ loyalty. Furthermore there are not a specific variable that drives customer loyalty more or less, several aspects are acting together in two high level groups. Another practical implication is that the gains of more loyal customers are higher for mobile customers since they buy more from the case company and stay longer as customers. However, for broadband customers, they only stay longer. Therefore the Net Promoter Score is not as useful to track for broadband customers. Either the broadband customers should have more opportunities to buy more or another metric should be used for broadband customers.

Mesh network is gaining importance as the next generation network for many high speed applications such as multimedia streaming. This is because it is easy and inexpensive to setup mesh networks with mobile and PDA devices and can be used as a private network. Hence research is active in the field of routing protocols and routing metrics to improve the mesh network performance. Though most of the protocols are evaluated based on simulation, we implemented protocols based on a few metrics like Expected Transmission Count (ETX) Per-hop Packet Pair Delay (Pkt Pair) and WCETT (Weighted Cumulative Expected Transmitted Time) to investigate the performance of the network through experiments. An advanced version of DSR protocol called LQSR (Link Quality Source Routing) protocol of Microsoft Research along with MCL (Mesh Connectivity Layer) allows multiple heterogeneous adapters to be used in mesh network. Since wireless adapters of 802.11a standard offer 12 non-interfering channels and 802.11b/g standard offer 3 non-interfering channels, using multiple adapters of different bands operating on non-interfering channels to improve capacity and robustness of mesh networks was also investigated. In this thesis we explore the possibility of increasing the coverage area of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) to enhance the capacity of WMN and minimize the problems due to interference. Theoretical achievable capacity to every node in a random static wireless ad-hoc network with ideal routing is known to be where n is the total number of nodes in the network. Therefore, with increasing number of nodes in a network, throughput drops significantly. Our measurements show that throughput in a single WMN for different path length is closer to the throughput with nodes across two WMNs of the same path length. We propose to interconnect the networks by using multiple wireless adapters in a gateway node configured with the SSID of the networks in operation. We exploit the DSR protocol feature of assigning locally unique interface indices to its adapters. Performance of a network depends heavily on the metrics used for routing packets. Different metrics were studied in the thesis by setting up a 10-node testbed with a combination of nodes with single and two radios. Testbed was partitioned into two networks with two gateway nodes. Performance of multi-radio performance with the above metrics was compared with baseline single radio nodes in the network with the same metric. It is found that multi-radio nodes out-perform single radio nodes in the multi-hop scenario. Also, operating multi-mesh networks using multiple interfaces configured to those networks in a gateway node increases the coverage area and robustness without loss of performance.

Les réseaux centrés sur l’information (ICN) sont une architecture prometteuse pour faire face à l’explosion du trafic multimédia sur internet et à la mobilité croissante des utilisateurs: non seulement ICN peut améliorer la qualité d’expérience de l’utilisateur, mais ICN peut également étendre naturelle et de façon transparente la prise en charge du trafic vidéo dans les fonctions réseau. Cependant, à notre connaissance, une évaluation approfondie des avantages apportés par ICN à la diffusion multimédia n’a pas encore été réalisée. Dans cette thèse, nous voulons réduire l’écart qui nous sépare d’une telle évaluation en prenant en compte ICN dans divers scénarios de diffusion multimédia.Tout d’abord, nous évaluons les avantages apportés par du DAS (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming) basé sur ICN par rapport au streaming basé sur TCP/IP, au moyen d’une campagne expérimentale comprenant plusieurs canaux (des émulations Wi-Fi et LTE, des traçes 3G/4G), plusieurs clients (mélange homogène et hétérogène, arrivées synchrones et asynchrones) et des logiques d’adaptation DAS soigneusement sélectionnées pour couvrir les deux grandes familles d’algorithmes disponibles. Nous mettons aussi enexergue les pièges potentiels qui sont néanmoins facilement évitables.Ensuite, nous montrons comment l’assistance du réseau contribue à améliorer la qualité d’expérience des utilisateurs. Pour ce faire, nous tirons parti de la fonctionnalité de mise en cache réseau d’ICN et proposons un signal re ́seau simple envoyé périodiquement par le cache à exploiter par l’algorithme d’adaptation DAS pour optimiser la qualité d’expérience de l’utilisateur en évitant le phénomène bien connu des oscillations induites par le cache. Des expériences nous permettent de valider le bien-fondé de notre approche.Enfin, puisque la diffusion multimedia en direct gagne du terrain, nous proposons hICN-RTC, en intégrant hICN (hybrid ICN), une solution ICN-dans-IP, à WebRTC, accompagné du protocole RICTP (Realtime Information Centric Transport Protocol), un protocole de transport basé sur le contenu, qui minimise la latence. Bien que toujours en développement, les résultats des premières expériences sont prometteurs car ils montrent que le trafic induit par hICN-RTC ne croit qu’avec le nombre de locuteurs actifs plutôt qu’avec le nombre total de participants. / Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a promising architecture to address today Internet multimedia traffic explosion and increasing user mobility: not only to enhance the user’s quality of experience, but also to naturally and seamlessly extend video sup- port deeper in the network functions. However, to the best of our knowledge, a thorough assessment of the benefits brought by ICN to multimedia delivery has not been done yet. In this thesis, we aim at reducing the gap to such assessment, by considering ICN in various multimedia delivery scenarios.First, we assess the benefits brought by an ICN-based Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS) compared to TCP/IP based streaming, by means of an experimental campaign that includes multiple channels (e.g., emulated Wi-Fi and LTE, real 3G/4G traces), multiple clients (homogeneous vs heterogeneous mixture, synchronous vs asynchronous arrivals) and carefully selected DAS adaptation logics to cover the broad families of available adaptation algorithms. We also warn about potential pitfalls that are nonethelesseasily avoidable.Second, we show how network assistance helps im- proving the users’ quality of experience. To do so, we leverage the in-network caching feature of ICN and propose a simple periodical network signal from the cache (i.e., per-quality hit ratio) to be exploited by DAS adaptation logic to enhance further the user’s quality of experience by avoiding the known cache-induced quality oscillations. We confirm the soundness of our approach through experiments.Finally, as live multimedia delivery is gaining momentum, we propose hICN-RTC by integrating hICN (hybrid ICN), an ICN-in-IP solution, to WebRTC and we design RICTP (Realtime Information Centric Trans- port Protocol), a content-aware transport that minimizes the communication latency. Although still in development, the results we gathered from early experiments are promising as they show that hICN-RTC scales with the number of active speakers rather than the total number of participants.

En los últimos años, el consumo de servicios multimedia ha aumentado y se prevé que esta tendencia continúe en un futuro próximo, convirtiendo el tema de la evaluación de la Calidad de la Experiencia (QoE) en un tema muy importante para valorar el servicio de los proveedores. En este sentido, la optimización de la QoE recibe cada vez más atención ya que las soluciones actuales no han tenido en cuenta, la adaptación, la viabilidad, la rentabi-lidad y la fiabilidad. La presente memoria se centra en la caracterización, diseño, desarrollo y evaluación de diferentes aplicaciones multimedia, con el fin de optimizar la QoE. Por tanto, este trabajo investiga la influencia que la infraestructura de redes, las características de los videos y los terminales de los usuarios, presentan en la QoE de los servicios multimedia actuales en Internet. Esta tesis se basa en la investigación exhaustiva de la evaluación subjetiva y objetiva de QoE en redes heterogéneas. Los desafíos y cuestiones relacionados con el estado de la técnica y se discuten en esta disertación. En la primera fase, diseñamos una metodología de prueba para evaluar la QoE en la transmisión de video en directo y a través de plataformas de video bajo demanda en redes Wi-Fi y celulares. A partir de esta fase inicial, propondremos los problemas a investigar y las preguntas para resolver a lo largo de esta disertación. Nuestra metodología hace uso de métricas subjetivas y objetivas para evaluar la QoE percibida por los usuarios finales. Se realiza un conjunto de experimentos en laboratorio donde nuestra metodología de pruebas es aplicada. Los resultados obtenidos se recopilan y analizan para extraer las relaciones entre la Calidad de servicio (QoS) y QoE. A partir de estos resultados, se propone un mapeo de QoS-QoE que permite predecir la QoE. En la siguiente fase de la investigación, desarrollamos los algoritmos de optimización de QoE basados en la administración del sistema de red para redes Wi-Fi y celulares. Los algoritmos usan los parámetros clave que se tuvieron en cuenta para la evaluación de QoE. El objetivo de estos algorit-mos es proporcionar un sistema de gestión flexible para las redes con el ob-jetivo de lograr un equilibrio controlado entre la maximización de QoE y la eficiencia del uso de los recursos. Por último, se diseña el banco de pruebas del sistema para evaluar el rendimiento de las aplicaciones de servicios multimedia genéricos en los diferentes entornos de prueba. El banco de pruebas del sistema se basa en el enfoque de virtualización; usa los recursos compartidos de un hardware fí-sico para virtualizar todos los componentes. El banco de pruebas virtualiza-do proporciona funciones de red virtualizadas para diferentes escenarios, como Internet (las redes de distribución de contenido - CDNs) y redes inalámbricas. Por lo tanto, se adoptan protocolos livianos y mecanismos ágiles en el sistema, para proporcionar un mejor servicio a los usuarios fina-les. Los resultados de QoE son proporcionados a los proveedores de servi-cios de acuerdo con los parámetros que se definen en el proceso de la eva-luación. Como resultado hemos obtenido un sistema que presenta un servi-cio rentable como una forma factible para la evaluación de la prueba. / In recent years, multimedia services consumption has increased and it is expected that this trend will continue in the near future, becoming the evaluation of Quality of Experience (QoE) as a very important issue for assessing the quality of providers' services. In this sense, the optimization of the QoE is progressively receiving much attention considering that current solutions are not based on the adaptation, feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. The present dissertation is focused on the characterization, design, development and evaluation of different multimedia applications aimed to optimize the QoE. Therefore, this work investigates the influence that the networks infrastructure, the videos' characteristics and the users' terminals present on QoE of the current Internet multimedia services. The work is based on a comprehensive research of subjective and objective assessments in heterogeneous networks. Challenges and research questions related to the state of the art are discussed in this dissertation. In the first phase of this dissertation, we design a test methodology for assessing QoE of live video streaming and video on demand platforms to be transmitted over Wi-Fi and cellular networks. From this initial step, we will propound the related research issues and questions to solve this dissertation. Our methodology considers the use of subjective and objective metrics to evaluate the QoE perceived by end-users. A set of laboratory experiments is conducted where our proposed methodology is applied. The obtained results are gathered and analyzed to extract the relations between Quality of Service (QoS) and QoE. From the results, we propose a QoS-QoE mapping which allows predicting QoE. In the next phase of the research, we develop QoE-optimization algorithms based on network system management for Wi-Fi and cellular networks. The algorithms use the key parameters that were taken into account for QoE assessment. The goal of these algorithms is to provide a flexible management system for the networks in order to achieve the desirable trade-off between QoE maximization and resource usage efficiency. Lastly, the system testbed is designed in order to evaluate the performance of generic multimedia services applications for the different environments under test. The system testbed is based on virtualization approach; it uses the shared resources of a physical hardware to virtualize all components. The virtualized testbed provides virtualized network functions for the different scenarios such as the Internet (Content Delivery Networks - CDNs) and wireless networks. Therefore, lightweight protocols and agile mechanisms are adopted in the system to provide enhanced service to end-users. The QoE results are reported to the service providers according to the parameters defined in the evaluation process. As a result, we have obtained a cost-effective system, which is considered as a feasible way for test evaluation. / En els últims anys, el consum de serveis multimèdia ha augmentat i es preveu que aquesta tendència continue en un futur pròxim, convertitnt el tema de l'avaluació de la Qualitat d'Experiència (QoE) una tasca molt im-portant per a valorar el servei dels proveïdors. En aquest sentit, l'optimització de la QoE rep cada vegada més atenció degut a que les solucions actuals no tenen en compte, l'adaptació, la viabilitat, el rendiment i la fiabilitat. La present memòria se centra en la caracterització, disseny, desenvolupament i avaluació de diferents aplicacions multimèdia, amb la finalitat d'optimitzar la QoE. Per tant, aquest treball investiga la influència que la infraestructura de les xarxes, les característiques dels videos i els terminals dels usuaris tenen sobre la QoE dels serveis multimèdia actuals d'Iinternet. Aquesta tesi es basa en una recerca exhaustiva de l'avaluació subjectiva i objectiva de QoE en xarxes heterogènies. Els desafiaments i preguntes relacionats amb l'estat de la tècnica es discuteixen en aquesta dissertació. En la primera fase, dissenyem la metodologia de prova per a avaluar la QoE de transmissió de video en directe i de plataformes de video baix demanda en xarxes Wi-Fi i cel·lulars. A partir d'aquest primer pas, proposem els problemes de recerca relacionats i les preguntes a resoldre a través d'a-questa tesi. La nostra metodologia fa ús de mètriques subjectives i objecti-ves per a avaluar la QoE dels usuaris finals. Es realitzen un conjunt d'expe-riments en laboratori on s'aplica la nostra metodología. Els resultats obtin-guts es recopilen i analitzen per a extraure les relacions entre la QoS i la QoE. A partir d'aquests resultats, esproposa un mapatge de QoS-QoE que ens permetrà predir la QoE. En la següent fase de la recerca, desenvolupem els algoritmes d'optimi-tzació de la QoE per a l'administració de xarxes Wi-Fi i cel·lulars. Els algo-ritmes utilitzen els paràmetres clau que es van tenir en compte per a l'ava-luació de QoE. L'objectiu d'aquests algoritmes és proporcionar un sistema de gestió flexible per ales xarxes que permetrá aconseguir un equilibri con-trolat entre la maximització de la QoE i l'us eficient dels recursos. Finalment, el banc de proves del sistema està dissenyat per a avaluar el rendiment de les aplicacions de serveis multimèdia genèrics en els diferents entorns de prova. El banc de proves del sistema es basa en l'enfocament de virtualització; usa els recursos compartits d'un equip físic que virtualitza tots els components. El banc de proves virtualitzat proporciona les funcions de xarxa virtualitzades per a diferents escenaris, com Internet (les xarxes de distribució de continguts - CDNs) i xarxes sense fils. Per tant, s'adopten protocols lleugers i mecanismes àgils en el sistema per a proporcionar un millor servei als usuaris finals. Els resultats de QoE son proporcionats als proveïdors de serveis d'acord amb els paràmetres que es defineixen en el procés de l'avaluació. Com a resultat, hem obtés un sistema que presenta un servei rendible i com a viable per a l'avaluació de la prova. / Abdullah, MT. (2018). Smart Client-Server Protocol and Architecture for Adaptive Multimedia Streaming [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/103324