In der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung mit mobilen Internet-Diensten sind Quality of Service (QoS) und Quality of Experience (QoE) als hochkomplexe und verbundene Konzepte zu erkennen. QoS umfasst dabei die technische Sicht auf das Telekommunikationsnetz, charakterisiert durch leistungsrelevante Parameterwerte (z. B. Durchsatz und Latenz). QoE hingegen bezieht sich auf die Bewertung des Nutzererlebnisses (z. B. Zufriedenheit und Akzeptanz). Zur gemeinsamen Erklärung bedarf es einer multi- bzw. interdisziplinären Betrachtung zwischen Ingenieurs- und Humanwissenschaften, da neben der Technik auch der Mensch als Nutzer in den QoS-QoE-Zusammenhang involviert ist. Ein mehrschichtiges Modell erfasst die relevanten Einflussfaktoren und internen Zusammenhänge zwischen QoS und QoE sowohl aus Netz- als auch Nutzersicht. Zur Quantifizierung des Zusammenhangs konkreter Werte in einer empirischen QoE-Evaluation wurde ein umfangreiches psychophysikalisches Laborexperiment konzipiert. Das dafür entwickelte Netzemulations-Testbed erlaubt mobiltypische Netz- und Nutzungssituationen gezielt in einem Testparcours zusammenzubringen. Die formulierten Prinzipien zur Testrelevanz, -eignung und -effizienz berücksichtigen hierbei die Besonderheiten des Testaufbaus und -designs mit echten Endgeräten und Diensten. Die Ergebnisse von über 200 Probanden bestätigen die vorhergesagten QoS-QoE-Charakteristiken der sechs untersuchten Dienste als kontinuierlich-elastisch bzw. sprunghaft-fest. Dienstspezifisch lässt sich jeweils von einem angestrebten Grad der Nutzerzufriedenheit auf die notwendigen Werte der QoS-Netzparameter schließen, woraus sich ein QoS-QoE-Zufriedenheitskorridor zwischen einem unteren und oberen Schwellwert ergibt. Teilweise sind dabei QoS-unabhängige Faktoren, z. B. die Art der Präsentation der Stimuli in der App auf dem Endgerät, als ebenso relevant zu erkennen wie die QoS-Netzparameter selbst. / The thesis is centered on the relationship of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile Internet services. While QoS covers the technical view on the telecommunications network characterized by performance-related parameter values (e.g. throughput and latency), QoE refers to the assessment of the user experience (e.g. satisfaction and acceptability) in the use of the services. In the thesis QoS and QoE are revealed as highly complex and related concepts in theoretical contemplation. Integrating both concepts requires a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approach between engineering and human sciences to consider both - technological aspects of the network as well the human user. The designed multilayered model appropriately integrates the technical network view as well as the user's perspective by considering all relevant factors of influence and all internal relationships between QoS and QoE. The conducted extensive psychophysical laboratory experiment with real users, devices and services quantifies the relationship between specific QoS values and specific QoE values. A testbed developed for network emulation allows combining typical mobile network situations with typical usage situations in a controlled and focused manner. The three elaborated principles to test for relevance, suitability and efficiency take into account the special features of the test setup and test design. Test results gained from more than 200 volunteers confirm the predicted QoS-QoE-characteristics of the six tested mobile services to be either elastic or non-elastic. It is possible to conclude from the desired degree of user satisfaction on the necessary values of the QoS network parameters, which results in a QoS-QoE-corridor between lower and upper threshold values. Findings prove that QoS-independent factors, e.g. the type of presentation of the stimuli in the app on the user’s device, can be as relevant for QoE as the evaluated QoS network parameters themselves.

Provision of live streaming of video from fisheye camera is a popular business in the IT sector. Video dewarping is one of its special fields that expands rapidly. As the requirement of video quality becomes higher and higher, there is an increasing need for efficient solutions that can be utilized to process videos in attempts to gain desirable results. The problem is to determine the right combination of transmission bitrate and resolution for live streaming of the dewarped videos. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a prototype solution for dewarping video from fisheye camera and re-stream it to a client. This prototype is used for testing combinations of bitrate and resolution of the video in different scenarios. A system is devised to live stream a video from a fisheye camera, dewarp the video in a server and display the video in media players. The results reveal that the combination of bitrate 3.5 - 4.5 Mbps and resolution 720p is best suited for transmission to avoid noticeable lagging in playback. Comments of observers prove the promising use of the dewarped videos as Virtual Reality(VR) technology. / Direktsänd videoströmning från en kamera med fiskögaobjektiv är ett populärt och snabbväxande, speciellt inom vissa områden som videoförvrängning korrigering. Eftersom kravet på hög högkvalitativ video blir högre och högre, ökas också behovet av en effektiv videobearbetnings lösning för att få önskvärda resultat. Problemet är att bestämma rätt kombination av överföringsbithastighet och upplösning för direktströmning av bearbetade videon. Syftet med detta examensarbete är att utveckla en prototyplösning som korrigerar videoförvrängning från en kamera med fisköga-objektiv samt vidaresända den korrigerade videon till en klient. Denna prototyp används för att testa olika kombinationer av bithastighet och upplösning i olika scenarier. Ett prototypsystem utvecklades för att direktsända video från en kamera med fisköga-objektiv, korrigera videoförvrängningen i en server och spela upp de korrigerade video i en mediaspelare. Resultatet visar att kombinationen av bithastigheten mellan 3.5 - 4.5 Mbps och upplösningen 720p är den mest lämpliga för att undvika märkbara fördröjningar hos klienten. Den potentiella framtida användningen av den bearbetade videon inom Virtuell verklighet (VV) är lovande baserat på observatörernas kommentarer.

A dominant source of Internet traffic, today, is constituted of compressed images. In modern multimedia communications, image compression plays an important role. Some of the image compression standards set by the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) include JPEG and JPEG2000. The expert group came up with the JPEG image compression standard so that still pictures could be compressed to be sent over an e-mail, be displayed on a webpage, and make high-resolution digital photography possible. This standard was originally based on a mathematical method, used to convert a sequence of data to the frequency domain, called the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). In the year 2000, however, a new standard was proposed by the expert group which came to be known as JPEG2000. The difference between the two is that the latter is capable of providing better compression efficiency. There is also a downside to this new format introduced. The computation required for achieving the same sort of compression efficiency as one would get with the original JPEG format is higher. JPEG is a lossy compression standard which can throw away some less important information without causing any noticeable perception differences. Whereas, in lossless compression, the primary purpose is to reduce the number of bits required to represent the original image samples without any loss of information. The areas of application of the JPEG image compression standard include the Internet, digital cameras, printing, and scanning peripherals. In this thesis work, a simulator kind of functionality setup is needed for conducting the objective quality assessment. An image is given as an input to our wireless communication system and its data size is varied (e.g. 5%, 10%, 15%, etc) and a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) value is given as input, for JPEG2000 compression. Then, this compressed image is passed through a JPEG encoder and then transmitted over a Rayleigh fading channel. The corresponding image obtained after having applied these constraints on the original image is then decoded at the receiver and inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) is applied to inverse the JPEG 2000 compression. Quantization is done for the coefficients which are scalar-quantized to reduce the number of bits to represent them, without the loss of quality of the image. Then the final image is displayed on the screen. The original input image is co-passed with the images of varying data size for an SNR value at the receiver after decoding. In particular, objective perceptual quality assessment through Structural Similarity (SSIM) index using MATLAB is provided.

To be successful in today's competitive market, service providers should look at user's satisfaction as a critical key. In order to gain a better understanding of customers' expectations, a proper evaluations which considers intrinsic characteristics of perceived quality of service is needed. Due to the subjective nature of quality, the vagueness of human judgment and the uncertainty about the degree of users' linguistic satisfaction, fuzziness is associated with quality of experience. Considering the capability of Fuzzy logic in dealing with imprecision and qualitative knowledge, it would be wise to apply it as a powerful mathematical tool for analyzing the quality of experience (QoE). This thesis proposes a fuzzy procedure to evaluate the quality of experience. In our proposed methodology, we provide a fuzzy relationship between QoE and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. To identify this fuzzy relationship a new term called Fuzzi ed Opinion Score (FOS) representing a fuzzy quality scale is introduced. A fuzzy data mining method is applied to construct the required number of fuzzy sets. Then, the appropriate membership functions describing fuzzy sets are modeled and compared with each other. The proposed methodology will assist service providers for better decision-making and resource management.

Nowadays, Third Generation (3G) mobile phones equipped with powerful hardware are becoming popular and dominating the market of cellular com-munication systems. Features such as music and video players, in-built Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, navigation maps, Internet connectivity and high resolution cameras has converted mobile phones into so called Smartphones. With the increase in applications and services, limitations on energy consumption are also increasing. Therefore, it is more im-portant for manufacturers to nd e ective means of increasing battery life of mobile phones, as the mobile device itself is energy consuming and longer operational times are demanded by customers. Good energy mangement in mobile phones requires a good understanding of the energy usage in mobile phones. To this end, this thesis report presents the results of power and energy consumption measurements conducted on available Smartphones. The services under investigation includes basic Smartphone functionalities and few Internet services are studied and conclusions were drawn. This paper presents a cost e ective methodology for reliable measurements of energy on Smartphones. It also examines the e ect of operating systems on en-ergy consumption in mobile phones and reports less energy consumption for Android supported phones. The energy consumption of these Smartphones with respect to various applications has been studied and related to Quality of Experience of users'. Based on the results conclusions were drawn. / This Thesis will serve as a guide to manufacturers and Users of smartphones while choosing smartphones and designing energy-efficient protocols. / +46 (0)723260656

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.

[ES] La distribución de contenidos multimedia, y en particular el streaming de vídeo, domina actualmente el tráfico global de Internet y su importancia será incluso mayor en el futuro. Miles de títulos se agregan mensualmente a los principales proveedores de servicios, como Netflix, YouTube y Amazon. Y de la mano del consumo de contenidos de alta definición que se convierte en la principal tendencia, se puede observar nuevamente un incremento en el consumo de contenidos 3D. Esto ha hecho que las temáticas relacionadas con la producción de contenidos, codificación, transmisión, Calidad de Servicio (QoS) y Calidad de Experiencia (QoE) percibidas por los usuarios de los sistemas de distribución de vídeo 3D sean un tema de investigación con numerosas contribuciones en los últimos años. Esta tesis aborda el problema de la prestación de servicios de transmisión de vídeo 3D bajo condiciones de red de ancho de banda variable. En este sentido, presenta los resultados de la evaluación de la QoE percibida por los usuarios de los sistemas de vídeo 3D, analizando principalmente el impacto de los efectos introducidos en dos de los elementos de la cadena de procesamiento de vídeo 3D: la etapa de codificación y el proceso de transmisión. Para analizar los efectos de la codificación en la calidad del vídeo 3D, en la primera etapa se aborda la evaluación objetiva y subjetiva de la calidad del vídeo, comparando el rendimiento de diferentes estándares y métodos de codificación, con el fin de identificar aquellos que logran la mejor relación entre calidad, tasa de bits y tiempo de codificación. Así mismo, en el contexto de la transmisión en un entorno simulcast, se evalúa la eficacia de la utilización de las codificaciones asimétricas para la transmisión de vídeo 3D, como una alternativa para la reducción del ancho de banda manteniendo la calidad global. En segundo lugar, para el estudio del impacto y el rendimiento del proceso de transmisión, se ha trabajado sobre la base de un sistema de transmisión dinámica adaptativa sobre HTTP (DASH) en el contexto de la transmisión de vídeo tanto 2D como 3D, utilizando diferentes escenarios de variación de ancho de banda. El objetivo ha sido el desarrollo de un marco de referencia para la evaluación de la QoE en escenarios de transmisión adaptativa de vídeo 3D, que permite analizar el impacto en la QoE del usuario frente a diferentes patrones de variación del ancho de banda, así como el rendimiento del algoritmo de adaptación frente a estos escenarios. El trabajo se enfoca en identificar el impacto en la Calidad de Experiencia del usuario que tienen aspectos como: la frecuencia, el tipo, el alcance y la ubicación temporal de los eventos de variación del ancho de banda. El sistema propuesto permite realizar mediciones de rendimiento de forma automatizada y sistemática para la evaluación de los sistemas DASH en el servicio de distribución de vídeo 2D y 3D. Se ha utilizado Puppeteer, la librería Node.js desarrollada por Google, que proporciona una API de alto nivel, para automatizar acciones en el protocolo Chrome Devtools, como iniciar la reproducción, provocar cambios de ancho de banda y guardar los resultados de los procesos de cambio de calidad, marcas de tiempo, paradas, etc. A partir de estos datos, se realiza un procesamiento que permite la reconstrucción del vídeo visualizado, así como la extracción de métricas de calidad y la evaluación de la QoE de los usuarios utilizando la recomendación ITU-T P.1203. / [CA] La distribució de continguts multimèdia, i en particular el streaming de vídeo, domina actualment el trànsit global d'Internet i la seua importància serà fins i tot mes gran en el futur. Milers de títols s'afegeixen mensualment als principals proveïdors de serveis, com ara Netflix, YouTube i Amazon. I de la mà del consum de continguts d'alta definició que es converteix en la tendència principal, es pot observar novament un increment en el consum de continguts 3D. Això ha fet que les temàtiques relacionades amb la producció de continguts, codificació, transmissió, Qualitat de Servei (QoS) i Qualitat d'Experiència (QoE) percebudes pels usuaris dels sistemes de distribució de vídeo 3D siguen un tema de recerca amb nombroses contribucions en els últims anys. Aquesta tesi aborda el problema de la prestació de serveis de transmissió de vídeo 3D sota condicions de xarxa d'ample de banda variable. En aquest sentit, presenta els resultats de l'avaluació de la QoE percebuda pels usuaris dels sistemes de vídeo 3D, analitzant principalment l'impacte dels efectes introduïts en dos dels elements de la cadena de processament de vídeo 3D: l'etapa de codificació i el procés de transmissió. Per analitzar els efectes de la codificació en la qualitat del vídeo 3D, a la primera etapa s'aborda l'avaluació objectiva i subjectiva de la qualitat del vídeo, comparant el rendiment de diferents estàndards i mètodes de codificació, per tal d'identificar aquells que aconsegueixen la millor relació entre qualitat, taxa de bits i temps de codificació. Així mateix, en el context de la transmissió en un entorn simulcast, s'avalua l'eficàcia de la utilització de les codificacions asimètriques per la transmissió de vídeo 3D, com una alternativa per la reducció de l'ampleada de banda mantenint la qualitat global. En segon lloc, per a l'estudi de l'impacte i el rendiment del procés de transmissió, s'ha treballat sobre la base d'un sistema de transmissió dinàmica adaptativa sobre HTTP (DASH) en el context de la transmissió de vídeo tant 2D com 3D, utilitzant diferents escenaris de variació d'ample de banda. L'objectiu ha estat el desenvolupament d'un marc de referència per a l'avaluació de la QoE en escenaris de transmissió adaptativa de vídeo 3D, que permet analitzar l'impacte en la QoE de l'usuari davant de diferents patrons de variació de l'ample de banda; així com el rendiment de l'algorisme d'adaptació davant d'aquests escenaris. El treball s'enfoca a identificar l'impacte a la Qualitat d'Experiència de l'usuari que tenen aspectes com ara: la freqüència, el tipus, l'abast i la ubicació temporal dels esdeveniments de variació de l'ample de banda. El sistema proposat permet realitzar mesuraments de rendiment de manera automatitzada i sistemàtica per a l'avaluació dels sistemes DASH en el servei de distribució de vídeo 2D i 3D. S'ha utilitzat Puppeteer, la llibreria Node.js desenvolupada per Google, que proporciona una API d'alt nivell, per automatitzar accions al protocol Chrome Devtools, com iniciar la reproducció, provocar canvis d'ample de banda i desar els resultats dels processos de canvi de qualitat, marques de temps, parades, etc. A partir d'aquestes dades, es fa un processament que permet la reconstrucció del vídeo visualitzat, així com l'extracció de mètriques de qualitat i l'avaluació de la QoE dels usuaris fent servir la recomanació ITU-T P.1203. / [EN] The distribution of multimedia content, and in particular video streaming, currently dominates global Internet traffic and will become even more important in the future. Thousands of titles are added monthly to major service providers such as Netflix, YouTube and Amazon. In addition to the consumption of high-definition content becoming the main trend, an increase in the consumption of 3D content can be observed again. This fact has caused that issues related to content production, encoding, transmission, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by users of 3D video distribution systems became a research topic with numerous contributions in recent years. This thesis addresses the problem of providing 3D video streaming services under variable bandwidth network conditions. In this sense, it presents the results of the evaluation of the QoE perceived by the users of 3D video systems, analyzing mainly the impact of the effects introduced in two of the elements of the 3D video processing chain: the encoding stage and the transmission process. To analyze the effects of the encoding process on the quality of 3D video, the first stage deals with the objective and subjective evaluation of video quality, comparing the performance of different encoding standards and methods, in order to identify those that achieve the best ratio between quality, bit rate and encoding time. Also, in the context of transmission in a simulcast environment, the advantages of using asymmetric coding for 3D video transmission is evaluated as an alternative for bandwidth reduction while maintaining overall quality. Secondly, for the study of the impact and performance of the transmission process, the work has been carried out on the basis of an adaptive dynamic over HTTP (DASH) transmission system in the context of both 2D and 3D video transmission, using different bandwidth variation scenarios. The aim has been to develop a framework for the evaluation of QoE in 3D adaptive video streaming scenarios, which allows analyzing the impact on the user's QoE against different bandwidth variation patterns, as well as the performance of the adaptation algorithm under these scenarios. The work focuses on identifying the impact on the user's Quality of Experience in aspects such as: frequency, type, range and temporal location of bandwidth variation events. The proposed system allows to perform performance measurements in an automated and systematic way for the evaluation of DASH systems in the 2D and 3D video distribution service. The tool Puppeteer, the Node.js library developed by Google, has been used, which provides a high-level API to automate actions in the Chrome Devtools protocol, such as starting playback, causing bandwidth changes and saving the results of the quality change processes, timestamps, stops, etc. From this data, a further processing is performed that allows the reconstruction of the displayed video, as well as the extraction of quality metrics and the evaluation of the QoE of the users using the ITU-T P.1203 recommendation. / Guzmán Castillo, PF. (2022). Evaluación de la QoE en un sistema de streaming adaptativo de vídeo 3D basado en DASH [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/186354 / TESIS

Video streaming is widely recognized as the next Internet killer application. It was not one of the Internet's original target applications and its protocols (TCP in particular) were tuned mainly for e efficient bulk file transfer. As a result, a significant effort has focused on the development of UDP-based special protocols for streaming multimedia on the Internet. Recently, there has been a shift in video streaming from UDP to TCP, and specifically to HTTP. HTTP streaming provides a very attractive platform for video distribution on the Internet mainly because it can utilize all the current Internet infrastructure. In this thesis we make the argument that the marriage between HTTP streaming and the current Internet infrastructure can create many problems and inefficiencies. In order to solve these issues, we provide a set of techniques and protocols that can help both the network and end-hosts to make better decisions to improve video streaming quality. The thesis makes the following contributions: - We conduct a characterization study of popular commercial streaming services on mobile platforms. Our study shows that streaming services make different design decisions when implementing video players on different mobile platforms. We show that this can lead to several inefficiencies and undesirable behaviors specially when several clients compete for bandwidth in a shared bottleneck link. - Fairness between traffic flows has been preserved on the Internet through the use of TCP. However, due to the dynamics of adaptive video players and the lack of standard client adaptation techniques, fairness between multiple competing video flows is still an open issue of research. Our work extends the definition of standard bitrate fairness to utility fairness where utility is the Quality of Experience (QoE) of a video stream. We define QoE max-min fairness for a set of adaptive video flows competing for bandwidth in a network and we develop an algorithm that computes the set of bitrates that should be assigned to each stream to achieve fairness. We design and implement a system that can apply QoE fairness in home networks and evaluate the system on a real home router. - A well known problem that has been associated with TCP traffic is the buffer bloat problem. We use an experimental setup to show that adaptive video flows can cause buffer bloat which can significantly harm time sensitive applications sharing the same bottleneck link with video traffic. In addition, we develop a technique that can be used by video players to mitigate this problem. We implement our technique in a real video player and evaluate it on our testbed. - With the increasing popularity of video streaming on the Internet, the amounts of traffic on the peering links between video streaming providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have become the source of many disputes. Hybrid CDN/P2P streaming systems can be used to reduce the amounts of traffic on the peering links by leveraging users upload bandwidth to redistribute some of the load to other peers. We develop an analysis for hybrid CDN/P2P systems that broadcast live adaptive video streams. The analysis helps the CDN to make better decisions to optimize video quality for its users.

This thesis addresses the problem of building a Cognitive Radio that has the ability to interact with human users in a better way by making use of Quality of Experience (QoE) as its basis and marshalling its resources optimally around the user. Salient activities of this thesis include: Analysis of CR leads to the definition of its basic functional blocks such as cognition, learning and adaptation of radio behaviour in a multi-disciplinary manner. CR tracts signal processing for radio and sensors, cognitive and behavioural psychology for user intelligence, machine learning and AI for decision systems and optimization etc. Therefore it provides a rich, fertile area to make lateral connections across diverse helds. This thesis proposes a broad definition for CR (called as Unifed Cognitive Radio) inspired by key foundation works described in literature. Besides, it also describes its functionality and its ecosystem. Taking cue from the definition of UCR, this thesis proposes architectural frame-works for various sub-systems. Also their design and implementation is achieved with the aid of a comprehensive tested setup and is tested using realistic scenarios. Builds a set of intelligent decision systems that help to achieve the set goal. This involves various design decisions with a set of diverse algorithms from the world of signal processing, machine learning and articial intelligence. Transitioning disparate small functional entities (mostly built around experiments) into an integrated system that works in real-world environment is the key aspect of this thesis. It is definitely a challenging task. Therefore, starting from deterring the architectural reference frameworks for realizing various sub-systems of UCR to an evaluation based on integrated scenario, this being an important final step constitutes a sign cant amount of work. Analysis and implementation of the integrated system to meet the desired end functionality - QoE centricity of the CR system to satisfy the needs of the end user better is the contribution of this thesis

Dans le domaine de la vision par ordinateur l'utilisation de points d'intérêt (PI) est récurrente pour les problématiques de reconnaissance et de suivi d'objets. Plusieurs études ont prouvé l'utilité de ces techniques, associant robustesse et un temps de calcul pouvant être compatible avec le temps réel. Cette thèse propose d'étudier et d'exploiter ces descripteurs de statistiques de l'image sous un tout autre regard. Ainsi, nous avons menée une étude sur le lien entre les PI et la saillance visuelle humaine. De cette étude nous avons pu développer une méthode de prédiction de carte de saillance exploitant la rapidité d'exécution de ces détecteurs. Nous avons également exploité le pouvoir descriptif de ces PI afin de développer de nouvelles métriques de qualité d'images. Grâce à des résultats encourageant en terme de prédiction de qualité perçue et la faible quantité d'information utilisée, nous avons pu intégrer notre métrique "QIP" dans une chaîne de transmission d'images sur réseau sans fil de type MIMO. L'ajout de cette métrique permet d'augmenter la qualité d'expérience en garantissant la meilleure qualité malgré les erreurs introduites par la transmission sans fil. Nous avons étendu cette étude, par l'analyse fine des statistiques structurelles de l'image et des migrations d'attributs afin de proposer un modèle générique de prédiction des dégradations. Enfin, nous avons été amenés à conduire diverses expériences psychovisuelles, pour valider les approches proposées ou dans le cadre de la normalisation de nouveaux standards du comité JPEG. Ce qui a mené à développer une application web dédiée à l'utilisation et la comparaison des métriques de qualité d'images. / In the field of computer vision, the use of interest points (IP) is very frequent for objects tracking and recognition. Several studies have demonstrated the usefulness of these techniques, combining robustness and complexity that can be compatible with the real time. This thesis proposes to explore and exploit these image statistical descriptors under a different angle. Thus, we conducted a study on the relationship between IP and human visual saliency. In this study, we developed a method for predicting saliency maps relying on the efficiency of the descriptors. We also used the descriptive power of the PI to develop new metrics for image quality. With encouraging results in terms of prediction of perceived quality and the reduced amount of used information, we were able to integrate our metric "QIP" in an image transmission framework over a MIMO wireless network. The inclusion of this metric can improve the quality of experience by ensuring the best visual quality despite the errors introduced by the wireless transmission. We have extended this study by deeply analyzing structural statistics of the image and migration attributes to provide a generic model for predicting impairments. Finally, we conducted various psychovisual experiments to validate the proposed approaches or to contribute to JPEG standard committee. This led to develop a web application dedicated to the benchmark of image quality metrics.