Miran Taha

An architecture and protocol for smart continuous eHealth monitoring using 5G

Abstract Continuous monitoring of chronic patients improves their quality of life and reduces the economic costs of the sanitary system. However, in order to ensure a good monitoring, high bandwidth and low delay are needed. The 5G technology offers higher bandwidth, lower delays and packets loss than previous technologies. This paper presents an architecture for smart eHealth monitoring of chronic patients. The architecture elements include wearable devices, to collect measures from the body, and a smartphone at the patient side in order to process the data received from the wearable devices. We also need a DataBase with an intelligent system able to send an alarm when it detects that it is happening something anomalous. The intelligent system uses machine learning in BigData taken from different hospitals and the data received from the patient to diagnose and generate alarms. Experiment tests have been done to simulate the traffic from many users to the DataBase in order to evaluate the suitability of 5G in our architecture. When there are few users (less than 200 users), we do not find big differences of round trip time between 4G and 5G, but when there are more users, like 1000 users, it increases considerably reaching 4 times more in 4G The Packet Loss is almost null in 4G until 300 users, while in 5G it is possible to keep it null until 700 users. Our results point out that in order to have high number of patients continuously monitored, it is necessary to use the 5G network because it offers low delays and guarantees the availability of bandwidth for all users.

Intelligent Algorithm for Enhancing MPEG-DASH QoE in eMBMS

Multimedia streaming is the most demanding and bandwidth hungry application in today’s world of Internet. MPEG-DASH as a video technology standard is designed for delivering live or on-demand streams in Internet to deliver best quality content with the fewest dropouts and least possible buffering. Hybrid architecture of DASH and eMBMS has attracted a great attention from the telecommunication industry and multimedia services. It is deployed in response to the immense demand in multimedia traffic. However, handover and limited available resources of the system affected on dropping segments of the adaptive video streaming in eMBMS and it creates an adverse impact on Quality of Experience (QoE), which is creating trouble for service providers and network providers towards delivering the service. In this paper, we derive a case study in eMBMS to approach to provide test measures evaluating MPEG-DASH QoE, by defining the metrics are influenced on QoE in eMBMS such as bandwidth and packet loss then we observe the objective metrics like stalling (number, duration and place), buffer length and accumulative video time. Moreover, we build a smart algorithm to predict rate of segments are lost in multicast adaptive video streaming. The algorithm deploys an estimation decision regards how to recover the lost segments. According to the obtained results based on our proposal algorithm, rate of lost segments is highly decreased by comparing to the traditional approach of MPEG-DASH multicast and unicast for high number of users.

Wireless Technologies for IoT in Smart Cities

As cities continue to grow, numerous initiatives for Smart Cities are being conducted. The concept of Smart City encompasses several concepts being governance, economy, management, infrastructure, technology and people. This means that a Smart City can have different communication needs. Wireless technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiMax, 4G or LTE have presented themselves as solutions to the communication needs of Smart City initiatives. However, as most of them employ unlicensed bands, interference and coexistence problems are increasing. In this paper, the wireless technologies available nowadays for IoT in Smart Cities are reviewed. Their characteristics and their adequacy to each domain is considered. The problems derived of over-crowded unlicensed spectrum and coexistence difficulties among each technology are discussed as well. Finally, power consumption concerns are addressed.

Smart resource allocation for improving QoE in IP Multimedia Subsystems

Abstract IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a robust multimedia service. IMS becomes more important when delivering multimedia services. Multimedia service providers can benefit from IMS to ensure a good QoE (Quality of Experience) to their customers with minimal resources usage. In this paper, we propose an intelligent media distribution IMS system architecture for delivering video streaming. The system is based primarily on uploading a multimedia file to a server in the IMS. Later, other users can download the uploaded multimedia file from the IMS. In the system, we also provide the design of the heuristic decision methods and models based on probability distributions. Thus, our system takes into account the network parameters such as bandwidth, jitter, delay and packet loss that influence the QoE of the end-users. Moreover, we have considered the other parameters of the energy consumption such as CPU, RAM, temperature and number connected users that impact the result of the QoE. All these parameters are considered as input to our proposal management system. The measurements taken from the real test bench show the real performance and demonstrate the success of the system about ensuring the upload speed of the multimedia file, guaranteeing the QoE of end users and improving the energy efficiency of the IMS.

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.

SDN-based throughput allocation in wireless networks for heterogeneous adaptive video streaming applications

Adaptive video streaming providers take advantage of the HTTP protocol to deliver video contents to the applications of the end-users. Although, these applications use bitrate adaptation to adjust video resolution to network user conditions, this mechanism is used to improve fairness. Jains algorithm has been employed to determine the increase of the Quality of Experience (QoE) of end-users. In wireless networks, performance is highly degraded when there is high number of concurrent users requesting adaptive video streaming. As a result, the QoE of some users is unpredictably degraded. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based TCP throughput management algorithm to provide fairness to competing users over a wireless network. It provides fairness among clients in order to avoid oscillation of the video quality and stable buffer length. Real measurements show an improvement of 39% of fairness among users for two competing clients, 43% for three competing clients and 46% for four.

An Intelligent handover process algorithm in 5G networks: The use case of mobile cameras for environmental surveillance

The environmental surveillance using cameras is extremely important for researchers to monitor animal behaviors and as part of an environmental awareness program for children. Cameras installed on vehicles can be used to obtain videos, however, the mobility of the vehicle impacts on the uplink data rate. The next generation of mobile networks as known fifth-generation (5G) brings high improvement for massive data rate services as Internet of Things (IoT), although, the architecture of 5G consists of various heterogeneous cells coverage. The process of handover among cells faces significant challenges, such as weakness parameters of the handover process on selecting an appropriate network destination and tradeoff the network targets. In order to provide better QoS for ultra high definition (UHD) mobile users in the handoff process, we propose an intelligent handover algorithm model to decide on the handover process and the load balance among the network devices in the coverage area.

QoE assesment of MPEG-DASH in polimedia e-learning system

The development of Internet has brought the development of many e-learning platforms such as Polimedia (developed by the Polytechnic University of Valencia). It is used by the students to complement their training. In order to provide Polimedia users the best possible quality of experience (QoE), techniques of adaptive streaming over HTTP as MPEG DASH are being included. In this article, first, we show the procedure to setup a server to support MPEG DASH protocol. Then, a subjective QoE study in a controlled environment to evaluate the performance of MPEG DASH is presented. We determine the aspects that are most annoying to Polimedia platform users and we provide some recommendations to improve the QoE of Polimedia users.

Interactive Videos in IPTV using Hypervideolinks

One of the main advantages of IPTV is the full duplex capability communication between the TV provider and the clients. This interactivity allows the TV providers to obtain extra information from the clients. Moreover, the clients could even take profit of this type communication to allow surfing between videos. This feature cannot be used in Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). In this paper, we will show the development of an interactive video using hypervideolinks for IPTV services. Moreover, we will detail the protocol procedure between the TV provider and the clients. Some real measurements will be provided in order to show the bandwidth consumed and the number of packets needed for this service by each client.

Video artifact evaluation based on qos and objective qoe parameters

As the Quality of Experience of video streaming can be greatly affected by parameters such as jitter, throughput, packet loss and delay, it is of great importance to assess the consequences low Quality of Service. Video artifacts are errors that can be displayed when multimedia streaming faces transmission difficulties. Blocking, ringing, motion compensation mismatch or false borders are some of the different types of artifacts that can decrease video quality. In this paper, we perform an evaluation of video artifacts in order to determine the parameters that are related to their manifestation. We have also employed objective metrics of Quality of Experience in order to assess the impact of video artifacts on the overall quality. Results show that it is possible to relate available bandwidth, packet loss and jitter to several video artifacts. Where blocking depends on a high number of lost packets, mosaic pattern artifacts are related to a lower quantity of lost packets. In view of the obtained results, we propose a video artifact evaluating solution that utilizes said results for training.