Federico Alvarez

The Future Internet

Irrespective of whether we use economic or societal metrics, the Internet is one of the most important technical infrastructures in existence today. It will be a catalyst for much of our innovation and prosperity in the future. A competitive Europe will require Internet connectivity and services beyond the capabilities offered by current technologies. Future Internet research is therefore a must. This book is published in full compliance with the Open Access publishing initiative; it is based on the research carried out within the Future Internet Assembly (FIA). It contains a sample of representative results from the recent FIA meetings spanning a broad range of topics, all being of crucial importance for the future Internet. The book includes 32 contributions and has been structured into the following sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction: Foundations: architectural issues; socio-economic issues; security and trust; and experiments and experimental design. Future Internet Areas: networks, services, and content; and applications.

Scalable content delivery over P2P convergent networks

This paper describes an innovative system and its architecture to offer media scalable content delivery, increasing the robustness and resiliency, enriching the PQoS both within the network and/or at the end-user terminal, while protecting the content from unauthorized access over heterogeneous physical architecture and P2P logical overlay network topologies. The system is focused on different convergent networks including broadcasting, interactive/on demand bidirectional networks and mobile networks, and mesh P2P logical overlay topologies. This system is based on three technology pillars: Multi-layered/Multi-viewed content coding, Multi-source/multi-network streaming & adaptation, content protection and lightweight asset management. In addition, the applicability to IPTV over P2P convergent networks is described to demonstrate the system usefulness to offer commercial services.

Audience Measurement Modeling for Convergent Broadcasting and IPTV Networks

Audience research is a vital part of TV and radio broadcasting, as well as of the more recent forms of media content delivery, such as the Internet, IPTV, mobile phones, Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and portable media viewers. The uses of audience research range from self-promotion to refining service offerings and setting advertising rates. Without reliable audience data, many businesses will be reluctant to participate in the new platforms. This paper describes an end-to-end system for convergent audience measurement focused on IPTV but covering also terrestrial, cable, satellite and mobile broadcasting. We created the audience measurement system from the elaboration of a logical architectural model and a common data model which can be applied to any media scenario. We implemented this logical and data model in stationary and mobile media receivers (in the paper the particular case of IPTV is extensively explained). In addition user consumption is modeled and metrics are provided for user media consumption profiling and impact quantification in IPTV environments.

Recommender System for Sport Videos Based on User Audiovisual Consumption

This paper describes a recommender system for sport videos, transmitted over the Internet and/or broadcast, in the context of large-scale events, which has been tested for the Olympic Games. The recommender is based on audiovisual consumption and does not depend on the number of users, running only on the client side. This avoids the concurrence, computation and privacy problems of central server approaches in scenarios with a large number of users, such as the Olympic Games. The system has been designed to take advantage of the information available in the videos, which is used along with the implicit information of the user and the modeling of his/her audiovisual content consumption. The system is thus transparent to the user, who does not need to take any specific action. Another important characteristic is that the system can produce recommendations for both live and recorded events. Testing has showed advantages compared to previous systems, as will be shown in the results.

Secure geographic routing in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks

Security in sensor networks is one of the most relevant research topics in resource constrained wireless devices and networks. Several attacks can be suffered in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks (WSN), which are highly susceptible to attacks, due to the limited resources of the nodes. In this paper, we propose innovative and lightweight localization techniques that allow for intrusion identification and isolation schemes and provide accurate location information. This information is used by our routing protocol which additionally incorporates a distributed trust model to prevent several routing attacks to the network. We finally evaluate our algorithms for accurate localization and for secure routing which have been implemented and tested in real ad hoc and wireless sensor networks.

Protected seamless content delivery in P2P wireless and wired networks

Delivering protected seamless content services over heterogeneous networks should be solidly sustained on top of architectures that can offer support for guaranteed quality delivery according to network or consumer requirements. The delivery of personalized, scalable, seamless, and trusted multimedia content delivery, while adequately protecting the content, is a key factor to provide seamless content services to the final user and provide a framework for user participation. This article describes novel forms of delivering seamless content services over P2P networks using multilayered/multiviewed content coding techniques, such as SVC/MVC, multisource/ multinetwork streaming, and adaptation, with special focus on enabling content protection and lightweight asset management for a secure and privacy keeping content delivery. The implementation has been validated in the framework of the European Project SEA (IST-214063).

Architectures for Future Media Internet

Among the major reasons for the success of the Internet have been the simple networking architecture and the IP interoperation layer. However, the traffic model has recently changed. More and more applications (e.g. peer-to-peer, content delivery networks) target on the content that they deliver rather than on the addresses of the servers who (originally) published/hosted that content. This trend has motivated a number of content-oriented networking studies. In this paper we summarize some the most important approaches.

User centric media in the future internet: trends and challenges

The evolution of the Internet is being leaded by two main threads, one driven by industry through the evolution of networking infrastructures and the other driven by producers of content either in a professional or non professional way. Moreover, due to the explosion of the World Wide Web (which has started as a document repository) and its successful descendants (Semantic Web and Web 2.0), along with the dramatic increase of net-based audiovisual material (networked media) that has been produced by professional and amateur users, Internet is rapidly transforming to a full fledged virtual environment that facilitates services, interaction and communication. Therefore the vision that the Future Internet will be an Internet of Media centered in the user as content consumer and creator is starting now to be a reality. In this context, a series of new technical and social Challenges are emerging in order to enable this vision to thoroughly become true. In this paper, we present some of these Challenges and trends as a result of previous discussions within the User Centric Media Cluster of EU projects on Networked Media.

Improving retail efficiency through sensing technologies

Introduction of a new workflow to improve the quality and efficiency of the retail establishments.A great variety of innovative tools are explored, evaluating the most relevant results and proposing the most suitable solutions.Works described and evaluated concern about different kind of sensors and technologies, whose performance is detailed. Measuring customer reaction to new products for understanding their level of engagement is necessary for the future of retail. This work introduces a workflow to improve the quality and efficiency of the retail establishments in order to increase their attractiveness. Different research fields are explored to fulfill the requirements of the proposed scenario, remarking most useful works in the literature. The manuscript goes through relevant algorithms to infer properties of consumers like demography, attention or behavior based on their appearance (computer vision techniques), and on signal captured by generation sensors from smart mobile devices, that will add a great value for the retailers. This paper offers a complete overview of this research field which covers a great variety of innovative tools.

i-LAB: Distributed laboratory network for interactive TV Set-Top box and services testing

This paper presents a distributed laboratory network, defining its architecture and the test processes, to enable the testing of Set-Top boxes with interactive capacities and the remote execution of interactive television services based on DVB-MHP standard.