Valentin Burger

A Simple WiFi Hotspot Model for Cities

WiFi offloading has become increasingly popular. Many private and public institutions (e.g., libraries, cafes, and restaurants) already provide an alternative free Internet link via WiFi, but also commercial services emerge to mitigate the load on mobile networks. Moreover, smart cities start to establish WiFi infrastructure for current and future civic services. In this work, the hotspot locations of ten diverse large cities are characterized, and a surprisingly simple model for the distribution of WiFi hotspots in an urban environment is derived.

Impact of WiFi offloading on video streaming QoE in urban environments

Video streaming is the most popular application in todays mobile Internet and its growing demands and popularity put more and more load on cellular networks. In a recent trend to mitigate the cellular load, followed by many providers, users are offered to offload mobile connections to WiFi hotspots, which are predominately deployed in urban environments. In this work, we conduct a simulative performance evaluation of the impact of WiFi offloading on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video streaming. The evaluation is based on connectivity measurements from a German city and uses a simple QoE model for estimating the perceived quality of video streaming. Our findings show that, despite its benefits for operators, offloading to WiFi has a negative impact on video streaming QoE for some users when 3G/4G coverage is available. Only in the case of 2G coverage, WiFi offloading can significantly improve the perceived quality for users.

Socially-Aware Traffic Management

Socially-aware traffic management utilizes social information to optimize traffic management in the Internet in terms of traffic load, energy consumption, or end user satisfaction. Several use cases can benefit from socially-aware traffic management and the performance of overlay applications can be enhanced. We present existing use cases and their socially-aware approaches and solutions, but also raise discussions on additional benefits from the integration of social information into traffic management as well as practical aspects in this domain.

Increasing the Coverage of Vantage Points in Distributed Active Network Measurements by Crowdsourcing

Internet video constitutes more than half of all consumer traffic. Most of the video traffic is delivered by content delivery networks (CDNs). The huge amount of traffic from video CDNs poses problems to access providers. To understand and monitor the impact of video traffic on access networks and the topology of CDNs, distributed active measurements are needed. Recently used measurement platforms are mainly hosted in National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). However, the view of these platforms on the CDN is very limited, since the coverage of NRENs is low in developing countries. Furthermore, campus networks do not reflect the characteristics of end user access networks. We propose to use crowdsourcing to increase the coverage of vantage points in distributed active network measurements. In this study, we compare measurements of a global CDN conducted in PlanetLab with measurements assigned to workers of a crowdsourcing platform. Thus, the coverage of vantage points and the sampled part of the global video CDN are analyzed. Our results show that the capability of PlanetLab to measure global CDNs is rather low, since the vast majority of requests is directed to the US. By using a crowdsourcing platform we obtain a diverse set of vantage points that reveals more than twice as many autonomous systems deploying video servers.

Group-based communication in WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a very popular mobile messaging application, which dominates todays mobile communication. Especially the feature of group chats contributes to its success and changes the way people communicate. The group-based communication paradigm is investigated in this work, particularly focusing on the usage of WhatsApp, communication in group chats, and implications on mobile network traffic.

Energy Considerations for WiFi Offloading of Video Streaming

The load on cellular networks is constantly increasing. Especially video streaming applications, whose demands and requirements keep growing, put high loads on cellular networks. A solution to mitigate the cellular load in urban environments is offloading mobile connections to WiFi access points, which is followed by many providers recently. Because of the large number of mobile users and devices there is also a high potential to save energy by WiFi offloading. In this work, we develop a model to assess the energy consumption of mobile devices during video sessions. We evaluate the potential of WiFi offloading in an urban environment and the implications of offloading connections on energy consumption of mobile devices. Our results show that, although WiFi is more energy efficient than 3G and 4G for equal data rates, the energy consumption increases with the amount of connections offloaded to WiFi, due to poor data rates obtained for WiFi in the streets. This suggests further deployment of WiFi access points or WiFi sharing incentives to increase data rates for WiFi and energy efficiency of mobile access.

Trade-Off between QoE and Operational Cost in Edge Resource Supported Video Streaming

The largest share of todays consumer Internet traffic is video streaming and its demand on content delivery networks is continuously growing. To cope with the increasing demand of video streaming, recent work proposes mitigating end-user equipment to support content delivery at the edge of the network. The throughput of end-user equipment supporting content delivery is limited by the uplink of the users Internet connection. Especially for video streaming insufficient throughput causes the video to stall and affects the Quality of Experience (QoE) of end-users. To prevent video streams from stalling, we consider a tiered caching architecture, which requests higher tier caches to support content delivery, if the uplink throughput drops below a certain threshold. We conduct a simulative performance evaluation of the mechanism to investigate its impact on the QoE of end-users. Our results show that especially if the upload bandwidth of end-user equipment is low the setting of the threshold has a high impact. This can be used by operators to achieve the desired trade-off between QoE and operational cost for cache resources.

On the computation of entropy production in stationary social networks

Completing their initial phase of rapid growth, social networks are expected to reach a plateau from where on they are in a statistically stationary state. Such stationary conditions may have different dynamical properties. For example, if each message in a network is followed by a reply in opposite direction, the dynamics is locally balanced. Otherwise, if messages are ignored or forwarded to a different user, one may reach a stationary state with a directed flow of information. To distinguish between the two situations, we propose a quantity called entropy production that was introduced in statistical physics as a measure for non-vanishing probability currents in nonequilibrium stationary states. The proposed quantity closes a gap for characterizing online social networks. As major contribution, we show the relation and difference between entropy production and existing metrics. The comparison shows that computational intensive metrics like centrality can be approximated by entropy production for typical online social networks. To compute the entropy production from real-world measurements, the need for Bayesian inference and the limits of naïve estimates for those probability currents are shown. As further contribution, a general scheme is presented to measure the entropy production in small-world networks using Bayesian inference. The scheme is then applied for a specific example of the R mailing list.

Performance evaluation of backhaul bandwidth aggregation using a partial sharing scheme

To cope with the increasing demand of mobile devices and the limited capacity of cellular networks mobile connections are offloaded to WiFi. The access capacity is further increased, by aggregating bandwidth of WiFi access links. To analyze the performance of aggregated access links we model the most simple case of two cooperating systems interchanging capacities using an offloading scheme. The resulting analytic model is computed by means of a two-dimensional birth and death process. It can be used to seamlessly evaluate the performance of systems between partitioning and complete sharing. This allows to optimize the setting of thresholds dependent on the load of the cooperating system. Furthermore the benefit of aggregating bandwidth in different scenarios with homogeneous and heterogeneous workloads is quantified and the performance of more than two cooperating systems is evaluated by simulation.

Social Network Analysis in the Enterprise: Challenges and Opportunities

Enterprise social software tools are increasingly being used to support the communication and collaboration between employees, as well as to facilitate the collaborative organisation of information and knowledge within companies. Not only do these tools help to develop and maintain an efficient social organisation, they also produce massive amounts of fine-grained data on collaborations, communication and other forms of social relationships within an enterprise. In this chapter, we argue that the availability of these data provides unique opportunities to monitor and analyse social structures and their impact on the success and performance of individuals, teams, communities and organisations. We further review methods from the planning, design and optimisation of telecommunication networks and discuss challenges arising when wanting to apply them to optimise the structure of enterprise social networks.