Nutrition Education Professionals (NEP) working for Extension Agents of Kentucky were surveyed to evaluate their use of a variety of tools in nutrition education in three areas: nutrition, food safety, and food preparation. The purpose of this research was to determine the perception and usage of video streaming/electronic media among community nutrition professionals as a means to better educate individuals in Kentucky and furthermore, to determine if demographics of NEP affect their utilization of this technology. The results concluded that regardless of demographics, NEP perceive video streaming/electronic media to be effective in nutrition education. However, age, employment length, and video characteristics affect NEP inclination to use this technology

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.

As transistors size and power limitations stroke computer industry, hardware parallelism arose as the solution, bringing old forgotten problems back into equation to solve the existing limitations of current parallel technologies. Compilers regain focus by being the most relevant puzzle piece in the quest for the expected computer performance improvements predicted by Moores law no longer possible without parallelism. Parallel research is mainly focused in either the language or architectural aspects, not really giving the needed attention to compiler problems, being the reason for the weak compiler support by many parallel languages or architectures, not allowing to exploit performance to the best. This thesis addresses these problems by presenting: Erbium, a low level streaming data-flow language supporting multiple producer and consumer task communication; a very efficient runtime implementation for x86 architectures also addressing other types of architectures; a compiler integration of the language as an intermediate representation in GCC; a study of the language primitives dependencies, allowing compilers to further optimise the Erbium code not only through specific parallel optimisations but also through traditional compiler optimisations, such as partial redundancy elimination and dead code elimination.

An unprecedented era of “connected vehicles” is becoming an imminent reality. This is driven by advances in vehicular communications, and the development of in-vehicle telematics systems supporting a plethora of applications. The diversity and multitude of such developments will, however, introduce excessive congestion across wireless infrastructure, compelling operators to expand their networks. An alternative to network expansions is to develop more efficient content delivery paradigms. In particular, alleviating Radio Access Network (RAN) congestion is important to operators as it postpones costly investments in radio equipment installations and new spectrum. Efficient RAN frameworks are therefore paramount to expediting this realm of vehicular connectivity. Fortunately, the predictability of human mobility patterns, particularly that of vehicles traversing road networks, offers unique opportunities to pursue proactive RAN transmission schemes. Knowing the routes vehicles are going to traverse enables the network to forecast spatio-temporal demands and predict service outages that specific users may face. This can be accomplished by coupling the mobility trajectories with network coverage maps to provide estimates of the future rates users will encounter along a trip. In this thesis, we investigate how this valuable contextual information can enable RANs to improve both service quality and operational efficiency. We develop a collection of methods that leverage mobility predictions to jointly optimize 1) long-term wireless resource allocation, 2) adaptive video streaming delivery, and 3) energy efficiency in RANs. Extensive simulation results indicate that our approaches provide significant user experience gains in addition to large energy savings. We emphasize the applicability of such predictive RAN mechanisms to video streaming delivery, as it is the predominant source of traffic in mobile networks, with projections of further growth. Although we focus on exploiting mobility information at the radio access level, our framework is a direction towards pursuing a predictive end-to-end content delivery architecture. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-30 06:15:34.31

Streaming audio/video contents over the Internet requires large network bandwidth and timely delivery and playback of the media data. However, large network latency and jitter cause long start-up delay and frequent unwanted pauses in the playback, respectively. An entire audio/video media file cannot be cached due to intellectual property right concerns of the content owners, security reasons, and also due to its large size. This makes a streaming service hard to scale using conventional proxy caches. Media file compression using variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoding is often preferred in order to get constant quality compressed videos. VBR-encoding produces traffic burst, which not only wastes bandwidth but also inserts hiccup in the media playback. The standard frame sequence of a compressed video stream is only suitable for normal playback. lts inter-frame dependency makes it difficult to play it in interactive playback modes, such as fast forward/backward, jump and play backward. Moreover, different interactive clients generally ask for different playback sequences. Hence, they cannot be served together using a common server stream. Therefore, as the frequency of interaction increases, an ordinary scalable streaming service transforms into a non-scalable service. In this thesis, we present a new proxy based constant-bit-rate (CBR) streaming scheme that allows a server to transmit a VBR-encoded video at a fixed rate, close to its mean encoding bit-rate, and deals with the network latency and jitter issues efficiently without caching an entire media file at the proxy. We use a prefix buffer at the proxy to cache the prefixes of popular videos in order to minimize the start-up delay and to enable near mean bit rate streaming. We present a new proxy based scalable streaming scheme that uses our CBR streaming scheme. We use the smoothing buffer at the proxy not only to eliminate jitter and traffic burst effects but also to enable many clients to share the same server stream. We also present a new interactive and scalable streaming scheme, which divides a video stream into several logical segments and provides segment-by-segment interactive playback options to the clients. We use hybrid temporal-data-partition scalable encoding to create a suitable playback sequence for the interactive playback modes. Experimental result shows that our streaming scheme remains fully scalable even when all the clients are highly interactive. As further improvements, we present a new on demand and user driven segmentation and proxy buffer provisioning (prefix caching) mechanism for our interactive and scalable streaming scheme in order to avoid buffer over provisioning at the proxy as well as to avoid the use of complex video segmentation algorithms. We also present a new collaborative-proxy-peering system in order to get better resource utilization and performance from a set of proxies that are used to stream a video. Mathematical expressions to compute the precise sizes of the prefix and the smoothing buffers as well as the precise amounts of bandwidth requirements have been developed. All our streaming schemes have been analyzed and the results of Java simulation programs have shown their effectiveness.

As mobile devices still have limited battery life, processing power, memory, and display size, they cannot yet execute gaming applications with the same fidelity and quality as their PC counterparts. In response, researchers have recently performed research with the goal of the real-time delivery of game content specifically to fit within mobile devices’ limitations. In this thesis, we present a novel approach to tackling the streaming of objects to mobile devices. Our goal is to reduce the number of objects subject to streaming from the server to the target devices, while not violating the user-defined limitations through an efficient, context-aware 3D object selection and prioritization scheme. We take advantage of the game context to stream only the most relevant objects. Our evaluations have shown that this technique not only leads to better performance in general, but also increases the gameplay experience by helping the player to achieve a higher score.

Fourth Generation (4G) cellular technology Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) offers high data rate capabilities to mobile users; and, operators are trying to deliver a true mobile broadband experience over LTE networks. Mobile TV and Video on Demand (VoD) are expected to be the main revenue generators in the near future [36] and efficient video streaming over wireless is the key to enabling this. 3GPP recommends the use of H.264 baseline profiles for all video based services in Third Generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) networks. However, LTE networks need to support mobile devices with different display resolution requirements like small resolution mobile phones and high resolution laptops. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is required to achieve this goal. Feasibility study of SVC for LTE is one of the main agenda of 3GPP Release10. SVC enhances H.264 with a set of new profiles and encoding tools that may be used to produce scalable bit streams. Efficient adaptation methods for SVC video transmission over LTE networks are proposed in this thesis. Advantages of SVC over H.264 are analyzed using real time use cases of mobile video streaming. Further, we study the cross layer adaptation and scheduling schemes for delivering SVC video streams most efficiently to the users in LTE networks in unicast and multicast transmissions. We propose SVC based video streaming scheme for unicast and multicast transmissions in the downlink direction, with dynamic adaptations and a scheduling scheme based on channel quality information from users. Simulation results indicate improved video quality for more number of users in the coverage area and efficient spectrum usage with the proposed methods.

By equipping vehicles with the on-board wireless facility, the newly emerged vehicular networking targets to provision the broadband serves to vehicles. As such, a variety of novel and exciting applications can be provided to vehicular users to enhance their road safety and travel comfort, and finally raise a complete change to their on-road life. As the content distribution and media/video streaming, such as Youtube, Netflix, nowadays have become the most popular Internet applications, to enable the efficient content distribution and audio/video streaming services is thus of the paramount importance to the success of the vehicular networking. This, however, is fraught with fundamental challenges due to the distinguished natures of vehicular networking. On one hand, the vehicular communication is challenged by the spotty and volatile wireless connections caused by the high mobility of vehicles. This makes the download performance of connections very unstable and dramatically change over time, which directly threats to the on-top media applications. On the other hand, a vehicular network typically involves an extremely large-scale node population (e.g., hundreds or thousandths of vehicles in a region) with intense spatial and temporal variations across the network geometry at different times. This dictates any designs to be scalable and fully distributed which should not only be resilient to the network dynamics, but also provide the guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) to users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of the vehicular networking imposed by its intrinsic dynamic and large-scale natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical systems to enable the cost-effective and QoS guaranteed content distribution and media streaming services to vehicular users. Note that to effective- ly deliver the content from the remote Internet to in-motion vehicles, it typically involves three parts as: 1.) an infrastructure grid of gateways which behave as the data depots or injection points of Internet contents and services to vehicles, 2.) protocol at gateways which schedules the bandwidth resource at gateways and coordinates the parallel transmissions to different vehicles, and 3.) the end-system control mechanism at receivers which adapts the receiver’s content download/playback strategy based on the available network throughput to provide users with the desired service experience. With above three parts in mind, the entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address each part in one topic with: 1.) design of large-scale cost-effective content distribution infrastructure, 2.) MAC (media access control) performance evaluation and channel time scheduling, and 3.) receiver adaptation and adaptive playout in dynamic download environment. In specific, in the first topic, we propose a practical solution to form a large-scale and cost-effective content distribution infrastructure in the city. We argue that a large-scale infrastructure with the dedicated resources, including storage, computing and communication capacity, is necessary for the vehicular network to become an alternative of 3G/4G cellular network as the dominating approach of ubiquitous content distribution and data services to vehicles. On addressing this issue, we propose a fully distributed scheme to form a large-scale infrastructure by the contributions of individual entities in the city, such as grocery stores, movie theaters, etc. That is to say, the installation and maintenance costs are shared by many individuals. In this topic, we explain the design rationale on how to motivate individuals to contribute, and specify the detailed design of the system, which is embodied with distributed protocols and performance evaluation. The second topic investigates on the MAC throughput performance of the vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) communications when vehicles drive through RSUs, namely drive-thru Internet. Note that with a large-scale population of fast-motion nodes contending the chan- nel for transmissions, the MAC performance determines the achievable nodal throughput and is crucial to the on-top applications. In this topic, using a simple yet accurate Marko- vian model, we first show the impacts of mobility (characterized by node velocity and moving directions) on the nodal and system throughput performance, respectively. Based on this analysis, we then propose three enhancement schemes to timely adjust the MAC parameters in tune with the vehicle mobility to achieve the maximal the system throughput. The last topic investigates on the end-system design to deliver the user desired media streaming services in the vehicular environment. In specific, the vehicular communications are notoriously known for the intermittent connectivity and dramatically varying throughput. Video streaming on top of vehicular networks therefore inevitably suffers from the severe network dynamics, resulting in the frequent jerkiness or even freezing video playback. To address this issue, an analytical model is first developed to unveil the impacts of network dynamics on the resultant video performance to users in terms of video start-up delay and smoothness of playback. Based on the analysis, the adaptive playout buffer mechanism is developed to adapt the video playback strategy at receivers towards the user-defined video quality. The proposals developed in the three topics are validated with the extensive and high fidelity simulations. We believe that our analysis developed in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on understanding the fundamental performance of the vehicular content distribution networks from the aspects of session-level download performance in urban vehicular networks (topic 1), MAC throughput performance (topic 2), and user perceived media quality (topic 3). The protocols developed in the three topics, respectively, offer practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize the vehicular content distribution networks.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-108). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 5, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.