I avhandlingen beskrivs ett hypotetiskt system som kan användas av mobila användare, bland andra taxichaufförer, som exempelvis vill följa en viktig fotbollsmatch. Flera faktorer ställer till problem: Ibland står bilen still och föraren har inget annat att tänka på än matchen. Ibland kör denne runt med en kund som inte vill bli störd av matchen. Dessutom kan det vara svårt att titta på rörliga bilder och köra bil samtidigt. I och med att bilen körs runt har man också olika bra anslutning till Internet vid olika tillfällen – det kan variera mellan inget alls, en dålig GSM/GPRS förbindelse (8 kbps) och en snabb WLAN anslutning (100 Mbps). I avhandlingen presenteras en tre-lagers modell som kan användas för att beskriva den här typen av applikationers kvalitet. Modellen delas in i tre lager: nätverk, applikation och användare/använding. Det sistnämnda lagret ligger utanför det tekniska systemet och definieras av att det är där de verkliga informationsutbytet sker. På applikationsnivån samlas data in, packas och packas upp i samband med nätverkstransport och visas sedan för användaren. Det är också här som eventuell interaktion sker med användaren. Nätverkslagret är ansvarigt för ändamålsenlig transport av data. De tre lagren är ömsesidigt beroende av varandra. Dålig prestanda på ettlager påverkar de andra lagren och tvärtom. Tre studier har genomförts av hur problem på nätverkslagret i form av begränsad bandbredd och hög fördöjning påverkar användarna. Låg bandbredd ger låg videokvalitet vilket inte uppskattas av användarnamnen genom att skifta till animeringar som fungerar med lägre bandbredd kan man ändå få användarna nöjda. Om användarna måste välja mellandålig videokvalitet och animeringar väljer de som ser sig som fotbollskunniga det förstnämnda och de som ser sig som okunniga men dock fotbollsfans väljer det sistnämnda. Men i en annan studie där användarna spelade bluffstopp mot varandra över ett datanätverk fick vi ett annat resultat. Där var det negativt med högre videokvalitet (bilder per sekund). En förklaring kan vara att användarna distraherades mer av högre bildfrekvens. I den tredje studien studerades vad som händer i Pong om man läggerin fördröjningar i spelet. Sedan tidigare visste man att det blir svårare attspela med fördröjningar – särskilt om man inte märker dem. Vi ställde ossfrågan om man kan kompensera för dem genom att informera användarna om dem. Det visade sig att användare som får information med i vårtfall en prediktiv visning lättare anpassar sin mentala insats till uppgiftens svårighetsgrad. Det är alltså inte bara möjligt utan ibland också önskvärt att utnyttja en lägre bandbredd från användarens perspektiv. Med det sagt finns det ändå i långt fler situationer där det är bättre med bättre nätverksprestanda. Pongspelet var roligare med lägre delay. Videon uppfattades som bättre medhögre bandbredd i den förstnämnda studien. Multicast, där ett paket skickas till flera användare i stället för att de skafå varsin, identiska paket, är ett viktigt verktyg för att få bättre prestanda i videoapplikationer. Tyvärr är det inbyggda stödet för multicast i den viktiga IEEE 802.11 standardfamiljen för trådlösa nätverk mycket outvecklat. Ettstort problem är att det inte går att veta om ett paket har kommit fram eller om det har försvunnit i en, mycket trolig, krock. Vi har vidareutvecklat och anpassat en föga känd krockdetektionsmekanism från 80-talet för använding i IEEE 802.11 nätverk. Den anpassade algoritmen kallar vi EMCD vilket är en förkortning för ‘‘Early Multicast Collision Detection’’ eller tidig krockupptäckt för multicast. Vi har presenterat en nysannolikhetsbaserad modell för att beräkna algoritmens prestanda undermaximal belastning. Modellen som har verifierats genom simuleringar kanäven användas för att beräkna optimala parametrar för algoritmen. Algoritmen har visats kraftigt reducera risken för oupptäckta kollisioner och reducerar den tid som går åt för dem. EMCD-algoritmen inspirerade till att utveckla en ytterligare algoritm som inte bara kan upptäcka utan också undvika kollisioner: PREMA som står för ‘‘Prioritized Repeated Eliminations Multiple Access’’ eller prioriterad kanal-åtkomst med upprepade eliminationer. Det finns två viktiga skillnader mellanhur de fungerar. I EMCD bygger kollisionsdetektionen på rektangelfördelade slumptal och en enda upptäcktsomgång. I PREMA används i stället geometriskt fördelade slumptal och upprepade omgångar. Effekten blir att man med stor säkerhet får en enda vinnare. även för PREMA presenteras en sannolikhetskalkylsbaserad prestandaanalys för maxlastfallet vilken stöds av simuleringar. Samma formler kan användas för att approximativt skatta prestanda i EY-NPMA som är en närliggande algoritm. Den var tänkt att använda i Hiperlan/1; en standard som aldrig fick något kommersiellt genombrott. Använder man den modell som vi presenterar i avhandlingens sista studiekan man med ganska god noggrannhet beräkna optimala parametrar för EY-NPMA med en beräkningsinsats O(mY S) mot O(mES×mY S) för tidigare kända algoritmer. / Imagine a taxi driver wanting to watch a football game while working. Events in the game cannot be predetermined, the driver's available attentional resources vary and network connections change from non-existing to excellent, so it will be necessary to develop a viewing application that can adapt to circumstances. This thesis presents a system model and sketches a framework for design and run time adaptations. The model has three layers: user/usage, application and network. Quality of service metrics are proposed for each layer. A particular emphasis is placed on the difference between the user/usage layer and the application layer. Satisfaction at the former means a job well done, a match played to your liking etc. Satisfaction at the latter means good picture quality, nice colours etc. The thesis continues by identifying and describing elements required to build the system used by the taxi driver. Three studies are presented where either bandwidth or delay are varied at the network level. Video is better the higher the bandwidth; animations can be used as a complement. They are shown to be better than low quality video but worse than high quality video for watching a football game. Better video in the form of higher frame rates turned out to be worse for playing a card game over the Internet. A possible explanation is the distraction experienced when the image is updated constantly. Another result of our studies is that users can adapt their mental effort to the actual load when given feedback on the network delay affecting a computer game. The results mentioned above show that it is possible to compensate for poor network performance. For the user, improved network performance is generally more satisfactory. Early multicast collision detection is a method for improved multicast performance in high load IEEE 802.11 networks. Prioritised repeated eliminations multiple access is a method for multicast and other traffic which can be used alone or in an IEEE 802.11 network. Probabilistic performance analysis and simulations show that both protocols drastically reduce the time spent in collisions and improve throughput compared to IEEE 802.11. Some of the formulae are applied to EY-NPMA as well; they are used to estimate performance and to estimate optimal operating parameters more efficiently than with previously known methods.

This research investigates scalable video communications and its applications to video streaming, conferencing and 3DTV. Scalable video coding (SVC) is a layer-based encoding scheme that provides spatial, temporal and quality scalability. Heterogeneity of the Internet and clients' operating environment necessitate the adaptation of media content to ensure a satisfactory multimedia experience. SVC's layer structure allows the extraction of partial bitstreams at reduced spatial, quality and temporal resolutions that adjust the media bitrate at a fine granularity to changes in network state. The main focus of this research work is in developing such extraction algorithms in the context of SVC. Based on a combination of metadata computations and prediction mechanisms, these algorithms evaluate the quality contribution of each layer in the SVC bitstream and make extraction decisions that are aimed at maximizing video quality while operating within the available bandwidth resources. These techniques are applied in two-way interaction and one-way streaming of 2D and 3D content. Depending on the delay tolerance of these applications, rate-distortion optimized extraction algorithms are proposed. For conferencing applications, the extraction decisions are made over single frames and frame pairs due to tight end-to-end delay constraints. The proposed extraction algorithms for 3D content streaming maximize the overall perceived 3D quality based on human stereoscopic perception. When compared to current extraction methods, the new algorithms offer better video quality at a given bitrate while performing lesser number of metadata computations in the post-encoding phase. The solutions proposed for each application achieve the recurring goal of maintaining the best possible level of end-user quality of multimedia experience in spite of network impairments.

With camera, smart phone, and wireless connection to a worldwide distribution source on a single device that fits in your pocket, now billions of citizens are able to become sousveillant micro-media activist – in real time. This case study investigates purposive texts in detail from over 50 hours of live and archived streaming video webcasts taken from geographically diverse sites. The goal is to explore how this tool is being used by videographers in a complex 21st century social movement. My sample video texts were gathered in late February and early March 2012 as the Occupy Movement stirred to life after a relatively quiet winter (from the corporate media’s point-of-view). In this project, I examine how Occupy’s use of live-streaming video combines “mediated co-presence” (Giddens 1984; Ito 2005) with “networked autonomy” (Castells 2011) to represent the ambivalent face of a complex, postmodern movement for social justice. / text

A software application called Public News Network (PNN) is created in this thesis, which functions to produce an aesthetic experience in the viewer. The application engenders this experience by presenting a three-dimensional virtual world that the viewer can navigate using the computer mouse and keyboard. As the viewer navigates the environment she sees irregularly shaped objects resting on an infinite ground plane, and hears an ethereal wind. As the viewer nears the objects, the sound transforms into the sound of television static and text is displayed which identifies this object as representative of an episode of the evening news. The viewer "touches" the episode and a "disembodied" transcript of the broadcast begins to scroll across the screen. With further interaction, video of the broadcast streams across the surfaces of the environment, distorted by the shapes upon which it flows. The viewer can further manipulate and repurpose the broadcast by searching for words contained within the transcript. The results of this search are reassembled into a new, re-contextualized display of video containing the search terms stripped from their original, pre-packaged context. It is this willful manipulation that completes the opportunity for true meaning to appear.

This thesis presents compressive sensing algorithms that utilize system dynamics in the sparse signal recovery process. These dynamics may arise due to a time-varying signal, streaming measurements, or an adaptive signal transform. Compressive sensing theory has shown that under certain conditions, a sparse signal can be recovered from a small number of linear, incoherent measurements. The recovery algorithms, however, for the most part are static: they focus on finding the solution for a fixed set of measurements, assuming a fixed (sparse) structure of the signal. In this thesis, we present a suite of sparse recovery algorithms that cater to various dynamical settings. The main contributions of this research can be classified into the following two categories: 1) Efficient algorithms for fast updating of L1-norm minimization problems in dynamical settings. 2) Efficient modeling of the signal dynamics to improve the reconstruction quality; in particular, we use inter-frame motion in videos to improve their reconstruction from compressed measurements. Dynamic L1 updating: We present homotopy-based algorithms for quickly updating the solution for various L1 problems whenever the system changes slightly. Our objective is to avoid solving an L1-norm minimization program from scratch; instead, we use information from an already solved L1 problem to quickly update the solution for a modified system. Our proposed updating schemes can incorporate time-varying signals, streaming measurements, iterative reweighting, and data-adaptive transforms. Classical signal processing methods, such as recursive least squares and the Kalman filters provide solutions for similar problems in the least squares framework, where each solution update requires a simple low-rank update. We use homotopy continuation for updating L1 problems, which requires a series of rank-one updates along the so-called homotopy path. Dynamic models in video: We present a compressive-sensing based framework for the recovery of a video sequence from incomplete, non-adaptive measurements. We use a linear dynamical system to describe the measurements and the temporal variations of the video sequence, where adjacent images are related to each other via inter-frame motion. Our goal is to recover a quality video sequence from the available set of compressed measurements, for which we exploit the spatial structure using sparse representations of individual images in a spatial transform and the temporal structure, exhibited by dependencies among neighboring images, using inter-frame motion. We discuss two problems in this work: low-complexity video compression and accelerated dynamic MRI. Even though the processes for recording compressed measurements are quite different in these two problems, the procedure for reconstructing the videos is very similar.

With the increase in bandwidth, more widespread distribution of media, and increased capability of mobile devices, multimedia streaming has not only become feasible, but more economical in terms of space occupied by the media file and the costs involved in attaining it. Although much attention has been paid to peer to peer media streaming over the Internet using HTTP and RTSP, little research has focussed on the use of the Bluetooth protocol for streaming audio and video between mobile devices. This project investigates the feasibility of Bluetooth as a protocol for audio and video streaming between mobile phones using the J2ME platform, through the analysis of Bluetooth protocols, media formats, optimum packet sizes, and the effects of distance on transfer speed. A comparison was made between RFCOMM and L2CAP to determine which protocol could support the fastest transfer speed between two mobile devices. The L2CAP protocol proved to be the most suitable, providing average transfer rates of 136.17 KBps. Using this protocol a second experiment was undertaken to determine the most suitable media format for streaming in terms of: file size, bandwidth usage, quality, and ease of implementation. Out of the eight media formats investigated, the MP3 format provided the smallest file size, smallest bandwidth usage, best quality and highest ease of implementation. Another experiment was conducted to determine the optimum packet size for transfer between devices. A tradeoff was found between packet size and the quality of the sound file, with highest transfer rates being recorded with the MTU size of 668 bytes (136.58 KBps). The class of Bluetooth transmitter typically used in mobile devices (class 2) is considered a weak signal and is adversely affected by distance. As such, the final investigation that was undertaken was aimed at determining the effects of distance on audio streaming and playback. As can be expected, when devices were situated close to each other, the transfer speeds obtained were higher than when devices were far apart. Readings were taken at varying distances (1-15 metres), with erratic transfer speeds observed from 7 metres onwards. This research showed that audio streaming on the J2ME platform is feasible, however using the currently available class of Bluetooth transmitter, video streaming is not feasible. Video files were only playable once the entire media file had been transferred.

Ces dernières années, les terminaux mobiles sont devenus plus performants en termes de puissance de calcul, de mémoire, de taille et de la qualité de l'écran. Ces améliorations ont fortement stimulé la demande de services multimédias notamment la vidéo streaming. Par ailleurs les clients sont de plus en plus exigeants quant à la qualité rendue sur ce type de service. En plus une mauvaise expérience de la vidéo streaming a un grand impact sur la perception qu’ont les clients de l’opérateur. Optimiser la qualité d’expérience (QdE) des clients sur les services de la vidéo streaming est donc un enjeu concurrentiel majeur. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à modéliser et optimiser la QdE des services streaming en tenant compte des usages et de la mobilité des clients. En particulier, nous nous intéresserons à deux stratégies de délivrance des contenus sur le réseau mobile : la stratégie ‘’Fast Caching’’ et la stratégie ‘’On-Off’’. Nous développons des modèles analytiques qui nous permettent de calculer des indicateurs majeurs de la QdE pour le service streaming qui sont : i) la famine, qui pousse les opérateurs à envoyer plus de contenu et ii) la perte due à abandonner la lecture d’une vidéo, qui pousse ces derniers à envoyer du contenu vidéo d’une manière strictement raisonnable. Un équilibre optimal est à trouver. Nous proposons aussi des stratégies de gestion de la QdE en maintenant un bon niveau de QdE sur la totalité du réseau et en optimiser les indicateurs de la QdE du service streaming. / In recent years, mobile devices have become more powerful in terms of computing power, memory, size and screen quality. These improvements have greatly stimulated demand for multimedia services including video streaming. Moreover, customers are increasingly demanding in terms of the quality rendered on this type of service. In addition, a bad experience of video streaming has a great impact on the perception that customers have of the operator. Optimizing the quality of experience (QoE) of customers on the services of video streaming is thus a major competitive challenge. In this thesis, we are interested in modeling and optimizing the QoE of the streaming services taking into account the usages and the mobility of the clients. In particular, we are interested in two strategies for delivering content on the mobile network: the Fast Caching strategy and the On-Off strategy. We develop analytical models that allow us to calculate major indicators of the QoE for the streaming service that are: i) starvation, which drives operators to send more video content to customers and ii) the loss due to abandoning the video playback, which pushes them to send video content in a strictly reasonable manner. An optimal balance is to be found. We also propose QoE oriented strategies by maintaining a good level of QoE over the entire network and optimizing the QoE indicators of streaming services.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T14:32:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Nilbo Ribeiro Nogueira.pdf: 3536170 bytes, checksum: 6e2b8803fbf090503ad822071a4c9eb4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-05-20 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This research aims at analyzing the educational aspects that emerge when didactic materials in Distance Education consisted of diverse texts are used, that is, by the integration of verbal texts with streaming videos and images that can boost the approach of being virtually present. For such investigation, a didactic material that contained the previously described features was elaborated and made available at the web (www.espectrum.com.br/tese). During the interview process, the link to the access to the didactic material was sent to 29 people and they were oriented to use it, explore it and answer a questionnaire in which they could write their impressions and argumentations concerning the strategies and the multisemiological resources that were used. Based on the methodology of the Collective Subject Speech (CSS), Key Expressions and Central Ideas were extracted from the argumentations of the interviewed people, with which the collective speeches were elaborated. From these speeches came the educational aspects. Among the educational aspects that have emerged from this survey, we can point out that by means of streaming videos and images, the teacher can get closer to the students and is able to insert his/her personality in the didactic material. With the resources of being able to comment on the videos, there is a greater integration exchange and participation of the people that are part of the Distance Education. In the approach of the virtual integration, the focus is on the pedagogical mediation of the teacher so that the students can carefully consider the action of their practices, coming to the conclusion that it is extremely important for the teacher to be constantly together with his/her students. With the resources of the integration of the streaming videos and images to the verbal text, the teacher can be even closer to his/her students, not only in the mediation but also being able to show his/her personality and proximity through the didactic material / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar os aspectos educacionais que emergem quando são utilizados materiais didáticos em EaD on-line, constituídos de textos plurais, ou seja, pela integração de textos verbais com imagens e vídeos streaming, que possam potencializar a abordagem do estar junto virtual. Para a investigação, foi elaborado um material didático com as características anteriormente descritas e disponibilizado na web (www.espectrum.com.br/tese). No processo de entrevista, o link para acesso ao material didático foi enviado para 29 sujeitos, com a orientação para que utilizassem, explorassem e em seguida respondessem a um questionário em que poderiam colocar suas impressões e argumentações referentes às estratégias e aos recursos multisemióticos utilizados. Com base na metodologia do Discurso do Sujeito Coletivo (DSC), extrairam-se das argumentações dos entrevistados as Expressões Chave e Idéias Centrais, com as quais se elaboraram os discursos coletivos dos quais se destacaram os aspectos educacionais. Entre os aspectos educacionais que emergiram desta pesquisa, pode-se destacar que por meio da imagem e/ou do vídeo streaming o professor consegue se aproximar mais da turma inserindo a sua pessoalidade no material didático. Quanto aos recursos de poder comentar os vídeos, nota-se que se abre um espaço para maior integração, troca e participação dos que fazem parte da EaD on-line. Na abordagem do estar junto virtual o foco está na mediação pedagógica do professor para que os alunos reflitam na e sobre a ação de suas práticas, concluindo com isso a importância e necessidade de o professor estar junto constantemente com sua turma. Com os recursos de integração de imagens e vídeos streaming ao texto verbal, conseguiu-se aproximar mais ainda o professor de sua turma, que agora além de estar presente na mediação, também demonstra sua proximidade e pessoalidade nos recursos do material didático

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.

Le trafic de vidéo streaming étant en très forte augmentation dans les réseaux mobiles, il devient essentiel pour les opérateurs de tenir compte des spécificités de ce trafic pour bien dimensionner et configurer le réseau. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la modélisation du trafic de vidéo streaming dans les réseaux mobiles. Pour le trafic de vidéo streaming en temps-réel, nous obtenons une forme analytique pour une métrique de qualité de service (QoS) importante, le taux de perte de paquets, et utilisons ce modèle à faire du dimensionnement. Pour le trafic de vidéo streaming de type HTTP adaptatif, nous proposons et analysons d’autres métriques de QoS comme le bitrate moyen, le taux de déficit vidéo et le surplus de buffer, afin de trouver le bon compromis entre résolution de la vidéo et fluidité de la diffusion vidéo. Nous étudions par simulation l’impact de quelque paramètres clés du systéme. Nous montrons que l’utilisation de segments de vidéo courts, d’un nombre réduit d’encodages vidéos et de l’ordonnancement de type round robin améliore la fluidité de la vidéo tout en diminuant sa résolution. Nous proposons par ailleurs d’adapter le nombre des segments téléchargés dans une requête HTTP de sorte que chaque requête corresponde au même volume de données. Enfin, nous appliquons les techniques de l’apprentissage automatique pour analyser la corrélation entre les caracteristiques du système et la qualité d’expérience (QoE) des utilisateurs. / As the traffic of video streaming increases significantly in mobile networks, it is essential for oper- ators to account for the features of this traffic when dimensioning and configuring the network. The focus of this thesis is on traffic models of video streaming in mobile networks. For real-time video streaming traffic, we derive an analytical form for an important Quality-of-Service (QoS) metric, the packet outage rate, and utilize the model for dimensioning. For HTTP adaptive video streaming traffic, we propose and evaluate other QoS metrics such as the mean video bit rate, the deficit rate and the buffer surplus, so as to find the good trade-off between video resolution and playback smoothness. We study by simulation the impacts of some key parameters of the system. We show that using smaller chunk durations, fewer video coding rates and round-robin scheduling may provide a smoother video playback but decrease the mean video resolution. We also propose to adapt the number of chunks downloaded in an HTTP request so that each HTTP request has the same data volume. Finally, we apply machine learning techniques to analyze the correlation between system characteristics and the quality of experience (QoE) of users.