Scalable resilient media streaming
We present a low-overhead media streaming system, called SRMS (Scalable Resilient Media Streaming) that can be used to scalably deliver streaming data to a large group of receivers. SRMS uses overlay multicast for data distribution. to a large group of users. SRMS leverages a probabilistic loss recovery technique to provide high data delivery guarantees even under large network losses and overlay node failures. The clients in the SRMS system are able to interoperate with existing media streaming servers that use RTP for data transport. One of the interesting features of SRMS is that it can simultaneously support clients with disparate access bandwidths. It enables the necessary bandwidth adaptations using standard Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) mechanisms, e.g. RTP translators. We have implemented and evaluated the SRMS system in detail on an emulated network as well as on a wide-area testbed with up to 128 clients. Our results show that clients using SRMS achieve high (97%) data delivery ratios with low overheads (<5%) even for a very dynamic network (up to five membership changes per minute).

title: Backbone construction in selfish wireless networks
abstract: We present a protocol to construct routing backbones in wireless networks composed of selfish participants. Backbones are inherently cooperative, so constructing them in selfish environments is particularly difficult; participants want a backbone to exist (soothers relay their packets) but do not want to join the backbone (so they do not have to relay packets for others).
 We model the wireless backbone as a public good and use impatience as an incentive for cooperation. To determine if and when to donate to this public good, each participant calculates how patient it should be in obtaining the public good. We quantify patience using the Volunteer's Timing Dilemma (VTD), which we extend to general multihop network settings. Using our generalized VTD analysis, each node individually computes as its dominant strategy the amount of time to wait before joining the backbone. We evaluate our protocol using both simulations and an implementation. Our results show that, even though participants in our system deliberately wait before volunteering, a backbone is formed quickly. Further, the quality of the backbone (such as the size and resulting network lifetime) is comparable to that of existing backbone protocols that assume altruistic behavior.

title: Robust routing in wireless ad hoc networks
abstract: A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes with no fixed infrastructure. The absence of a central authorization facility in dynamic and distributed environments requires collaboration among nodes. When a source searches for a route to a destination, an intermediate node can reply with its cached entry. To strengthen correctness of such a routing discovery process, we propose a method in which the intermediate node requests its next hop to send a confirmation message to the source. After receiving both a route reply and confirmation message, the source determines the validity of a path according to its policy. As a result, this strategy discourages malicious nodes from intercepting packets. Simulation results show a remarkable improvement in throughput (30% higher delivery ratio and 10% less data transmission overhead) with a moderate increase of control messages.

title: Resilient multicast using overlays
abstract: We introduce Probabilistic Resilient Multicast (PRM): a multicast data recovery scheme that improves data delivery ratios while maintaining low end-to-end latencies. PRM has both a proactive and a reactive components; in this paper we describe how PRM can be used to improve the performance of application-layer multicast protocols especially when there are high packet losses and host failures. Through detailed analysis in this paper, we show that this loss recovery technique has efficient scaling properties-the overheads at each overlay node asymptotically decrease to zero with increasing group sizes. As a detailed case study, we show how PRM can be applied to the NICE application-layer multicast protocol. We present detailed simulations of the PRM-enhanced NICE protocol for 10 000 node Internet-like topologies. Simulations show that PRM achieves a high delivery ratio (>97%) with a low latency bound (600 ms) for environments with high end-to-end network losses (1%-5%) and high topology change rates (5 changes per second) while incurring very low overheads (<5%).

title: A new wireless ad hoc multicast routing protocol
abstract: An ad hoc network is a multi-hop wireless network of mobile nodes without the intervention of fixed infrastructure. Limited bandwidth and mobility require that ad hoc routing protocols be robust, simple, and energy conserving. This paper proposes a new ad hoc multicast routing protocol called neighbor-supporting multicast protocol (NSMP). NSMP adopts a mesh structure to enhance resilience against mobility. And NSMP utilizes node locality to reduce the overhead of route maintenance. NSMP also attempts to improve route efficiency and reduce data transmissions. Our simulation results show that NSMP delivers packets efficiently while substantially reducing control overhead in various environments.

title: Cooperative peer groups in NICE
abstract: A distributed scheme for trust inference in peer-to-peer networks is presented. Our work is in context of the NICE system, which is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the Internet. We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this information can be used to efficiently identify noncooperative users in NICE. We present a simulation based study of our algorithms, in which we show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node. Lastly, we show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.

title: Eyes alive
abstract: For an animated human face model to appear natural it should produce eye movements consistent with human ocular behavior. During face-to-face conversational interactions, eyes exhibit conversational turn-taking and agent thought processes through gaze direction, saccades, and scan patterns. We have implemented an eye movement model based on empirical models of saccades and statistical models of eye-tracking data. Face animations using stationary eyes, eyes with random saccades only, and eyes with statistically derived saccades are compared, to evaluate whether they appear natural and effective while communicating.

title: Designing Semistructured Databases: A Conceptual Approach
abstract: Semistructured data has become prevalent with the growth of the Internet. The data is usually stored in a database system or in a specialized repository. Many information providers have presented their databases on the web as semistructured data, while others are developing repositories for new applications. Designing a "good" semistructured database is important to prevent data redundancy and updating anomalies. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach to design semistructured databases. A conceptual layer based on the Entity-Relationship model is used to remove redundancies at the semantic level. An algorithm to map an ER diagram involving composite attributes weak entity types, recursive, n-ary and ISA relationship sets, and aggregations to a semistructured schema graph (S3-Graph) is also given.

title: A Z Approach in Validating ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in more data being accessed over the Internet. In turn there is an increase in the use of semistructured data, which plays a crucial role in many web applications particularly with the introduction of XML and its related technologies. This increase in use makes the design of good semistructured data structures essential. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally validate the ORA-SS data models in order to enhance the correctness of semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the Z formal language, and further validation processes are carried out to check the correctness of the semistructured data models at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Caching strategies in transcoding-enabled proxy systems for streaming media distribution networks
abstract: With the wide availability of high-speed network access, we are experiencing high quality streaming media delivery over the Internet. The emergence of ubiquitous computing enables mobile users to access the Internet with their laptops, PDAs, or even cell phones. When nomadic users connect to the network via wireless links or phone lines, high quality video transfer can be problematic due to long delay or size mismatch between the application display and the screen. Our proposed solution to this problem is to enable network proxies with the transcoding capability, and hence provide different, appropriate video quality to different network environment. The proxies in our transcoding-enabled caching (TeC) system perform transcoding as well as caching for efficient rich media delivery to heterogeneous network users. This design choice allows us to perform content adaptation at the network edges. We propose three different TeC caching strategies. We describe each algorithm and discuss its merits and shortcomings. We also study how the user access pattern affects the performance of TeC caching algorithms and compare them with other approaches. We evaluate TeC performance by conducting two types of simulation. Our first experiment uses synthesized traces while the other uses real traces derived from an enterprise media server logs. The results indicate that compared with the traditional network caches, with marginal transcoding load, TeC improves the cache effectiveness, decreases the user-perceived latency, and reduces the traffic between the proxy and the content origin server.

title: FGS-based video streaming test-bed for MPEG 21 universal multimedia access with digital item adaptation
abstract: It is a challenging problem to stream real-time video over heterogeneous networks with time-varying channel conditions and devices with different capabilities. In this paper, we present an FGS-based unicast video streaming test bed, which is now being considered by the MPEG-4/21 committee as a reference test bed. The proposed system supports resource adaptation delivery of the MPEG-21 DIA scheme which leads to a more strict evaluation methodology according to the MPEG committee specified common test conditions for scalable video coding. It provides easy control of media delivery with duplicable network conditions. To provide the best quality of service for each client, we propose relevant rate control, error protection, and transmission approaches in the content server, network interface, and clients, respectively.