Johnathan Ishmael

Deploying Rural Community Wireless Mesh Networks

Inadequate Internet access is widening the digital divide between town and countryside, degrading both social communication and business advancements in rural areas. Wireless mesh networking can provide an excellent framework for delivering broadband services to such areas. With this in mind, Lancaster University deployed a WMN in the rural village of Wray over a three-year period, providing the community with Internet service that exceeds many urban offerings. The project gave researchers a real-world testbed for exploring the technical and social issues entailed in deploying WMNs in the heart of a small community.

P2P-Based IPTV Services: Design, Deployment, and QoE Measurement

This paper introduces the recent design and development of a converged IPTV service that has been deployed within a live test-bed (Living Lab) at Lancaster University for thousands of students. High quality audio-visual content is distributed over heterogeneous IP-based content networks, on both set-top box and web-based platforms. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are exploited to provide energy efficient and low-cost delivery for commercial and user-generated content. The infrastructure and functional components are first presented exploring a number of key designs that facilitate the entire eco-system of content ingest, transcoding, P2P tracking, distribution, statistics, end systems, as well as integration of social networking. Due to the dynamic nature of P2P distribution, a quality measurement service with respect to user experience is also essential for the service evaluation and diagnosis. A multimodal QoE measurement framework which evaluates the IPTV services by collaborating measurements with a variety of different aspects is presented. Results of a use case are also described to verify the effectiveness of the measurement framework in exploiting relevant metrics from service components.

Social TV: The impact of social awareness on content navigation within IPTV systems

Internet Television (IPTV) is emerging as a new delivery method for offering access to digital TV and interactive services which potentially merge the “lean back” broadcast experience with more bidirectional “lean forward” interactivity. Within these environments, there is a significant growth in the volume and variety of content being offered which increases the difficulty and burden for the end-user in locating relevant content and finding something to watch. In this article we detail the design, implementation, and evaluation of a production IPTV service which operates on our University campus network. Our approach makes use of social networks as a mechanism for providing social awareness to individual users of an IPTV system. The goal is to facilitate an intuitive and simple media selection mechanism when considering vast amounts of live TV channels and on-demand content. Ultimately, we seek to explore whether social awareness can or does influence user behavior.

Multimodal QoE evaluation in P2P-based IPTV systems

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies provide efficient and low-cost delivery for commercial and user-generated content. Although a number of audio-visual content distribution services have been developed using P2P-based mechanisms, it is still a challenge to guarantee satisfactory user experience on high quality video streaming services due to the dynamic nature of P2P distribution. An objective assessment service is the key enabler of service quality monitoring and management. However, this complex task can not be achieved by any individual objective model that only captures a certain aspect of service quality. This paper introduces a multimodal quality evaluation framework that is specifically designed and implemented for the assessment of video streaming services in P2P-based IPTV systems. Results of initial experiments show the effectiveness of this framework.

Designing for social interaction with mundane technologies: issues of security and trust

This paper documents some of the socio-technical issues involved in developing security measures for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that are deployed as part of a community network. We are interested in discovering whether (and exactly how) everyday social interaction over the network is affected by security issues, and any consequent design implications. We adopt an interdisciplinary methodological approach to requirements, treating a community as an ‘organization’ and implementing an approach, OCTAVE, originally designed to uncover security elements for organizations. Using a focus group technique we chart some of the assets and security concerns of the community, concerns that need to be addressed in order for WMNs, or indeed any network, to become a truly ‘mundane technology’.

Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks have emerged as an important technology in building next-generation networks. They are seen to have a range of benefits over traditional wired and wireless networks including low deployment costs, high scalability and resiliency to faults. Moreover, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are often described as being autonomic with self-* (healing and configuration) properties and their popularity has grown both as a research platform and as a commercially exploitable technology.

Visawin: visualising a wireless network

Recent years have seen the evolution and subsequent deployment of wireless networking; providing network access to mobile users in many diverse locations. However, the very characteristics of wireless technology means that access to wireless resources can sometimes be sporadic. A lack of signal or interference from other devices can cause a users interactions with a network to fail. Currently there are very few integrated solutions available which provide both network engineers and end users with information regarding the coverage of a wireless network. This paper describes Visawin, an automated system which visualizes a wireless network; allowing for both improved wireless engineering and user operability. The paper presents the challenges involved in developing Visawin, as well as results demonstrating that the system is useful for both end users and engineers when planning and designing networks.

MeshUp: reliably evolving a living lab

Several benefits can be derived from having a user community associated with an experimental wireless network, such as access to real users network traffic. However, to ensure continued use of the network, it must provide acceptable levels of service. The software deployed in experimental networks is subject to high rates of change, which can lead to down-time. Often these experimental networks, so-called Living Labs, are deployed in remote locations with restricted access to hardware, and are in-part administered by non-technical users. This suggests that a mechanism is required by researchers for reliable and remote updating of the software on a Living Lab network. In this paper, we describe the design and open-source implementation of MeshUp - a novel reliable software update mechanism for network devices in a wireless mesh network. MeshUp will play a key role in our research by allowing us to remotely deploy new software and maintain acceptable service to users on the Wray Living Lab, ensuring its sustainability.

Reconciling community resource requirements in U-Nets

A challenge for future user-provided networks will be reconciling potentially conflicting demands for a finite resource, such as network bandwidth. In this position paper, we discuss how this problem is tackled in an operational community-driven wireless mesh network. A key outcome of this discussion is that, although the approach that has evolved is not ideal, it allows the reconciliation of conflicting demands for use of the shared network to reflect communal concerns; a property we believe is essential to its success, and that of user-provided networks. We argue that user-driven distributed arbitration of requests for resource is necessary in a user-provided network, and via a simple abstraction we discuss design options to enable this. The consequences of incorrect design decisions could negatively impact a network and its community of users. To help us make appropriate design decisions, we could look to scientific methods, such as game theory. However, we find them unable to model the intricacies of communal life, leading us to suggest it is necessary to stop considering users as anonymous rational persons and to start factoring in their personalities and beliefs.