Benjamin Molina

QoE Aware Service Delivery in Distributed Environment

Service delivery and customer satisfaction are strongly related items for a correct commercial management platform. Technical aspects targeting this issue relate to QoS parameters that can be handled by the platform, at least partially. Subjective psychological issues and human cognitive aspects are typically unconsidered aspects and they directly determine the Quality of Experience (QoE). These factors finally have to be considered as key input for a successful business operation between a customer and a company. In our work, a multi-disciplinary approach is taken to propose a QoE interaction model based on the theoretical results from various fields including pyschology, cognitive sciences, sociology, service ecosystem and information technology. In this paper a QoE evaluator is described for assessing the service delivery in a distributed and integrated environment on per user and per service basis.

A video streaming application for urban traffic management

Urban traffic control systems have based their technological infrastructure both on advanced analog close-circuit television systems (CCTV) and point-to-point links, providing difficult-to-scale and very expensive systems. The main goal of an urban traffic monitoring system is to capture, send, play and distribute video information from the streets of a certain city to a management centre where it is processed by different services. Current digitalization process of video networks, and the research carried out in the field of streaming media, has led vendors to present proprietary hardware and software solutions resulting in a strong dependency by their customers. This work presents an open urban traffic control system based in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) philosophy for hardware and software components, as well as open source and standardized protocols. The existence of open standards for video encoding and protocols for streaming media transmission over IP networks has led to the proposal of such a system. The proposed system is a suitable solution in terms of scalability, cost, interoperability and performance for traffic control systems. Furthermore, its architecture can be easily adapted to other video applications and tools like command and control, surveillance or security systems for military and civilian applications.

Modeling content delivery networks and their performance

Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have recently appeared as a method for reducing response times experienced by Internet users through locating multiple servers close to clients. Many companies have deployed their own CDN-and so demonstrating the resulting effectiveness. However, many aspects of deployment and implementation remain proprietary, evidencing the lack of a general CDN model to help the research community analyze different working scenarios. In this paper, we propose a general expression for a content distribution environment and study the performance impact of design variables such as caching hit ratios, network latency, number of surrogates, and server capacity. Our conclusions are supported with simulations results.

I3WSN: Industrial Intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks for indoor environments

Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) technologies have been successfully applied to a great variety of outdoor scenarios but, in practical terms, little effort has been applied for indoor environments, and even less in the field of industrial applications. This article presents an intelligent SWE application for an indoor and industrial scenario, with the aim of improving and increasing the levels of human safety. The base low-level architecture is built on top of wireless sensor networks (WSN) connected to a Sensor Observation Service (SOS). Higher layers in the architecture include services that make real time decisions based on the collected data. Both simulation and experimental results are presented. The paper shows the viability of our approach in terms of performance, scalability, modularity and safety.

A social framework for content distribution in mobile transient networks

Transient networks are spontaneous networks that appear for a short period of time in order to provide basic services such as connectivity and content distribution among a small community. Nowadays mobile devices are becoming multimode by nature providing multiple connection paths. This paper investigates the efficiency and benefit of a mobile transient network where multiple nodes collaborate offering a multihomed network with community services by means of intelligent agents. The paper also proposes the required architecture and negotiation protocols for such scenario with two different services: file downloading and multimedia streaming.

Wireless CDN video streaming architecture for IPTV

Wireless IPTV (Internet Protocol TeleVision) aims to make the traditional IPTV and related services available to users anywhere, anytime, on any device, and through any network. Mobile streaming TV is one of the alternatives to deploy such a system; others are DVB-H or MediaFLO. In this paper we propose an alternative CDN-based architecture to distribute contents to different access networks, in order to create a triple screen platform. The core elements of the system are the video streamers, acting as surrogates of the mobile CDN-based architecture, installed in the access networks (including mobile), and the transcoding servers in the premises of the content providers. The paper focused on the wireless part of the system, analyzing the architecture and performance results related with the video coding and the efficiency obtained due to the placement of the streaming servers. The system has been deployed by a Spanish media company for its use with different Telcos, ISPs and media companies.

A negotiation framework for content distribution in mobile transient networks

Transient networks are spontaneous networks that appear for a short period of time in order to provide basic services such as connectivity and content distribution among a small community. Nowadays mobile devices are becoming multimode by nature providing multiple connection paths. This paper investigates the efficiency and benefit of a mobile transient network where multiple nodes collaborate, offering a multihomed network with community services by means of intelligent agents. The paper concretely proposes an architecture able to fully support a peer-to-peer transient community during both negotiation and service steps for two different modes: file download and multimedia streaming. The first mode, implemented on intelligent and cooperative agents, provides two negotiation models (fair and dynamic) in order to guarantee wider flexibility for different possible scenarios and community models; the second one implements a content delivery system into transient community, taking advantage of multihomed features of mobile devices.

SWE Simulation and Testing for the IoT

Designing and testing large sensors networks can be performed by means of simulation tools. They facilitate faster tests without risks and also with reduced operational costs. Sensor networks are used in many environments, typically outdoors. In this paper we present the use of a high level sensor simulator and sensor web standards applied to an indoor industrial environment, in order to target workers safety. The FASyS (Fabrica Absolutamente Segura y Sostenible) CENIT project has as key challenge the continuous monitoring of industrial workers in order to proactively detect risks. For this, we developed a simulator representing multiple types and number of sensors and integrate it with a standard sensor database known as Sensor Observation Service (SOS). Furthermore, we develop a Human Computer Interface (HMI) to monitor all sensors and also a Control Center application to test one of the risks within the factory (collision detection).

Empowering smart cities through interoperable Sensor Network Enablers

Sensor Networks are increasingly playing a fundamental role in many application scenarios such as agriculture, maritime, healthcare, industrial and even military application. However, the high heterogeneity of sensor networks poses a great challenge in interoperability and cooperative work, and the building of technological bridges among wireless sensor network (WSN) islands is more and more a must for smart cities for an efficient operation. In this paper, we present a model for an Area Sensor Network (ASN) that combines and connects small networks (Body Sensor Networks), WSNs and even fixed sensor networks within a particular area of interest. Initial tests show that the combination of sensed data from multiple sources (sensor networks) produces synergetic services useful for smart cities.

Urban Traffic Control: A Streaming Multimedia Approach

Urban traffic control systems have based their technological infrastructure on both advanced analogical close-circuit television systems (TVCC) and point-to-point links, providing low-scalable and very expensive systems. The main goal of an urban traffic monitoring system is to capture, send, play and distribute video information from the streets of a certain city. Current digitalization process of video networks, and the research carried out in the field of streaming media, has led vendors to present proprietary hardware and software solutions resulting in a strong dependency among their customers. The existence of open standards for video encoding and protocols for streaming media transmission over IP networks has led us to propose this system. The work presents an open urban traffic control system which bases its design on COTS philosophy for hardware and software, as well as open source and standardized protocols. The proposed system is a suitable solution in terms of scalability, cost, interoperability and performance for traffic control systems. Furthermore, its architecture can be easily adapted to other video applications and tools