UPG PUBLICATIONS

A Packetization Technique for D-Cinema Contents Multicasting over Metropolitan Wireless Networks

Authors: Paolo Micanti, Giuseppe Baruffa, Fabrizio Frescura. Title: A Packetization Technique for D-Cinema Contents Multicasting over Metropolitan Wireless Networks. Conference: 2007 IEEE Mobile WiMAX Symposium, Orlando, FA, March 2007. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WIMAX.2007.348707 . Abstract— This paper presents a packetization strategy for the reliable electronic distribution of Digital Cinema (D-Cinema, DC) content. In particular, a reliable multicast protocol was used to send high definition video content to multiple receivers, allowing them to correctly receive the entire stream. The NORM protocol was chosen as multicast protocol, because of its guarantees on reliable transmission of both files and data. The target result is to send reliably DC contents, both using a single large file or a set of separate files. Applications in C++ were created to test our system.

Network Distribution of Digital Cinema Contents

Authors: Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella, Agnese Grasselli, Gianluca Reali. Title: Network Distribution of Digital Cinema Contents. Conference: IST Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit 2007, Budapest, Hungary, July 2007. Abstract — In this work, carried out in the framework of the IST Project EDCINE, we present some key issues related to the distribution of Digital Cinema contents through an IP network infrastructure. One of the main criticalities of the system is the huge size of the contents to be transported. From the operator perspective, this criticality translates into the objective of optimizing the usage of network resources while complying with the quality of service constraints, along with the need of keeping the overall management cost low. The goal of this paper is to present the network architecture and procedures, as well as the relevant mathematical models for analyzing the distribution of pre-recorded movies and live events.

Design and performance evaluation of a mechanism to share contents over broadcast channels

Authors: Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella and Gianluca Reali. Title: Design and performance evaluation of a mechanism to share contents over broadcast channels. Journal: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS (In Press). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/dac.893. Abstract - In this paper, we present a novel mechanism (Wireless Data Sharing, WDS) to share popular contents between a set of second-level (children) proxies connected to a parent proxy by means of a bandwidth- limited, wireless, broadcast channel. The idea is as follows: when one of the children proxies requests a content from the parent proxy, the parent publishes the transmission of this content over a specific TCP connection between itself and the requesting child, so as to enable all the other children to capture it. Finally, the parent starts transmitting the content and the children may listen to the broadcast channel and sniff the content from the TCP connection. This allows users served by these proxies to decrease the time to access contents, without any additional bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, such a mechanism is able to decrease the load of the parent proxy. This work provides a detailed description of the architecture and functions of the WDS system, with explicit reference to the prototype we implemented. This prototype enabled us to evaluate the performance of the data sharing mechanism from both user and network viewpoints. In this regard, we carried out a measurement campaign in an IEEE 802.11 environment to evaluate the performance of the mechanism quantitatively. The results show that the WDS system guarantees not only bandwidth saving, but also lower content access latency with respect to the legacy proxy hierarchy system. In addition, the signalling overhead associated with the publishing mechanism proves to be very low.

Error Correction and Concealment for JPEG 2000 Video Transmitted over Wireless Networks

Authors: Giuseppe Baruffa, Paolo Micanti, Fabrizio Frescura Title: Error Correction and Concealment for JPEG 2000 Video Transmitted over Wireless Networks Journal: International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems 2007, Trondheim, Norway, October 2007 (in press) DOI: http://dx.doi.org Abstract: The transmission of compressed video sequences over wireless networks represents a particularly challenging problem, since the obtained visual quality strongly depends on the characteristics of the error-prone channel and on the tools used to compress the original sequence. In this paper, we present some methods for error concealment and error correction, which can be used when JPEG 2000 is adopted as compression tool. A judicious use of the scalability properties, error correction tools supplied by this standard, and an appropriate data interleaving algorithm can provide a good performance when compared with other error recovery methods.

Reliable D-Cinema Multicasting over Heterogeneous Networks

Authors: Paolo Micanti, Giuseppe Baruffa, and Fabrizio Frescura Title: Reliable D-Cinema Multicasting over Heterogeneous Networks Journal: JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS (In Press) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/ Abstract: This paper presents a packetization strategy for the reliable electronic distribution of Digital Cinema (D-Cinema, DC) content. In this paper, new experimental results and design improvements are introduced, with respect to those presented in [1]. A reliable multicast protocol was used to send high definition DC video contents to multiple receivers, allowing them to correctly acquire the entire stream. NORM (NACK Oriented Reliable Multicast) was chosen as multicast protocol, because of the guarantees offered on the reliable transmission of data. The target result is to send reliably DC contents, by exploiting a number of multicast-enabled heterogeneous networks, such as fiber, satellite, WiMAX, etc. The results show that a reasonable transfer speed may be achieved even in presence of low transmission bandwidth and moderate packet loss rate.

A Packetization Technique for D-Cinema Contents Multicasting over Metropolitan Wireless Networks

Authors: Paolo Micanti, Giuseppe Baruffa, Fabrizio Frescura Book chapter in Advances in Mobile WiMAX (in press) Title: A Packetization Technique for D-Cinema Contents Multicasting over Metropolitan Wireless Networks Abstract: This chapter presents a packetization strategy for the reliable electronic distribution of Digital Cinema (D-Cinema, DC) content. In particular, a reliable multicast protocol was used to send high definition video content to multiple receivers, allowing them to correctly receive the entire stream. The NORM protocol was chosen as multicast protocol, because of its guarantees on reliable transmission of both files and data. The target result is to send reliably DC contents, both using a single large file or a set of separate files.

Definition and Performance Evaluation of a Request Routing Algorithm to Distribute Digital Cinema Contents

Authors: Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella, Gianluca Reali, Laura Rosati. Title: Definition and Performance Evaluation of a Request Routing Algorithm to Distribute Digital Cinema Contents. Conference: QoS-IP 2008, Venice, Italy, February 2008. Abstract—In this work, carried out in the framework of the IST Project EDCINE, we deal with the network distribution of Digital Cinema contents, through a Content Delivery Network, towards theatres. One of the main criticalities of the system is the very large size of the contents to be transferred while respecting the maximum download time requirements. From the operator perspective, this criticality translates into the objective of optimizing the usage of network resources while complying with QoS constraints. The goal of this paper is first to present the network architecture and procedures relevant to the distribution service, and to specifically analyse the problem of service request routing (4-7 routing), whose objective is to select a set of servers to satisfy a content request efficiently. In particular, we focus on the definition of the mathematical model of the problem of minimising the network operational cost of the content distribution. Since some known professional, optimisation tools are not able to find the global optimum even in very simple configurations, we propose a heuristic approach based on the min-plus convolution. Preliminary numerical results show that such an algorithm outperforms the selected professional tools, while maintaining an affordable computation time.

Network Delivery of Live Events in a Digital Cinema Scenario

Authors: Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella, Alessandro Parisi, and Gianluca Reali. Title: Network Delivery of Live Events in a Digital Cinema Scenario. Conference: VII Workshop in G/MPLS networks (WGN7), Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, March 2008. Abstract - The goal of this paper is to present a system able to support the network delivery of live events in an expected, future Digital Cinema scenario. This service can consume a large amount of network bandwidth, due to the large volume of transmitted data and to the number of receivers, thus multicast transmission proves to be very useful. Consequently, a key issue of the system is the request routing algorithm, the goal of which is to optimise the QoS guaranteed delivery of live streams in the backbone, each one towards a set of theatres. We consider the Multi Protocol Label Switching, which has emerged as an elegant solution to meet traffic engineering and resource reservation requirements, and focus on the overall request routing procedure, the mathematical modelling of the problem, and relevant solving algorithms. We present the comparative performance evaluation of these algorithms by means of an extensive simulation campaign performed with the OMNET++ simulation platform.

QoS-enabled multicast for delivering live events in a Digital Cinema scenario

Authors: Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella and Gianluca Reali. Title: QoS-enabled multicast for delivering live events in a Digital Cinema scenario. Journal: JOURNAL OF NETWORK AND COMPUTER APPLICATIONS (In Press). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2008.02.004 . Abstract - Digital Cinema (DC) consists of integration of new advanced digital technologies in the context of the cinema system. As regards the transport of DC content towards theatres, Distributors may select the method that is both economically and technically sound. In this work, which is carried out within the framework of the IST Integrated Project Enhanced Digital CINEma (EDCINE), we deal with the network distribution service provided by a Network Service Provider, which becomes a new actor in the DC business. One of the main criticalities of the system is the very large size of the contents to be transferred towards theatres. From the operator's perspective, this criticality translates into the objective of optimising the usage of network resources while complying with quality of service (QoS) constraints. The goal of this paper is to present the system which is able to support the network delivery of DC contents, with a special focus on live event delivery. This service can consume a large amount of network bandwidth, not only because of the volume of transmitted data, but also due to the number of receivers, and thus multicast transmission proves to be very useful. Consequently, a key issue of the overall distribution system is the request-routing algorithm, the goal of which is to optimise the QoS-guaranteed delivery of a number of live streams in the backbone, each one of which is sent towards a set of theatres (QoS multicast routing). We consider the MultiProtocol Label Switching mechanism, which has emerged as an elegant solution to meet traffic engineering and resource reservation requirements in backbone networks, and focus especially on the overall request-routing procedure, the mathematical modelling of the problem, and relevant solving algorithms. Finally, we present the comparative performance evaluation of these algorithms by means of an extensive simulation campaign performed with the OMNeT++ simulation platform.

Multicast distribution of Digital Cinema

Authors: G. Baruffa, M. Femminella, F. Frescura, P. Micanti, A. Parisi, G. Reali; Title: Multicast distribution of Digital Cinema; Conference: NEM Summit 2008, October 2008, Saint Malo, France; Abstract: In this work, carried out in the framework of the IST Project EDCINE, we present the problem of distributing Digital Cinema (DC) contents through an IP network infrastructure. The first criticality of the system is the huge size of the contents to be transported. This suggests the usage of reliable multicast procedures to save bandwidth at server side and in the network. The other criticality is represented by the download time, which is bounded by a maximum value of few hours specified by Exhibitors. This suggests to reserve network bandwidth to multicast flows to respect this constraint. We present a network architecture based on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) paradigm, which employs reliable multicast procedures to delivery DC contents when the network connecting the CDN mirror with theatres supports multicast. In addition, we address the problem of managing links with high packet error rates. This condition could be frequent in theatres access links of, especially when using wireless distribution technology. We present selected results showing that the IETF protocol NORM, suitably configured to face error prone channels, is a good candidate to accomplish the task of distributing DC contents within a maximum delivery time.