Peer-to-Peer (P2P): Is there really a 'war' between ISPs and application providers?

There's an interesting discussion ongoing at IETFs' ALTO mailing list questioning whether there's really a war between the ISPs and application (i.e., P2P) providers. The reason for this discussion is a presentation at the IETF meeting and the relevant slides can be found here. The background is as follows: ISPs do not disclose topology information - there're many possible reasons why - which would be beneficial for P2P systems. On the other hand, P2P systems do not disclose information about their users - mainly for privacy reasons - which would ease the management of the P2P traffic at the level of the ISP:

"...while the ISPs have constraints about what they can disclose, the ISPs are still able to provide useful policy information to the P2P applications. P2P applications have concerns about the privacy of their users, but do want to cooperate with the ISP to optimize network traffic in a manner beneficial to ISPs." --from here.

Currently, there are two solutions to this problem available. (1) the oracle service developed by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and (2) P4P developed at Yale University. The authors (Comcast/BitTorrent) of this email state that they have another solution or is that based on oracle service or P4P? However, I think that IETF is the right place to discuss this and I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion which will hopefully lead to a useful RFC.

CfP: Management of Wired-Wireless Multimedia Networks and Services

The 12th IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Management of Multimedia and Mobile Networks and Services (MMNS) will be held in October 26 to 30, 2009 at the fascinating Telecom Italia Future Centre (http://www.telecomfuturecentre.it) in Campo San Salvador, in the worldwide known and magnificent Venice, Italy, as part of the 5th International Week on the Management of Networks and Services (Manweek 2009).

The MMNS 2009 conference will provide participants with a high quality and intimate setting for discussion and debate. The conference is sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 6.6 on Management of Networks and Distributed Systems, with technical co-sponsorship by the IEEE Communications Society and specifically the Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM).

Scope

Since 1997, MMNS has established itself as a major conference for research and innovation in the management of multimedia technology and networked services. The scope of the conference has been expanded in recent years to include management of emerging mobile and wireless networks and their integration with more traditional network infrastructures. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers and scientists from academia and industry interested in state-of-the-art management of converged multimedia networks and services across heterogeneous networking infrastructures, while creating a public venue for result dissemination and intellectual collaboration.

The convergence of existing and emerging technologies such as broadband, mobile, and broadcast networks is considered as a promising opportunity for existing providers to increase their service subscriber base, so that the 4G vision and beyond becomes a reality. An important research effort is undertaken by main actors to face the multidimensional, in terms of transport technology, session signaling, and QoS provisioning, heterogeneity of Next Generation Networks (NGNs). Efficient management of these services is a key ingredient in the effort to provide cost effective, innovative services, and mass market solutions that are likely to become a major source of income for different stakeholders. The need to evolve management tools, solutions, platforms and methodologies to keep pace with emerging networks is at a critical juncture with the proliferation of mobile and wireless systems, intelligent and broadband networks, quadruple play convergence, and the integration of embedded systems in different domains, from smart homes/cities to next generation automotive systems.

The academic and industry research communities should unify forces to address the challenges of developing and operating converged multimedia networks and services. Inevitably, integrated management is a key element in addressing this challenge. The MMNS 2009 technical program committee is soliciting research papers in the broad area of network and service management that address new models, architectures, and technological designs to enable multimedia and mobility proliferation in NGNs. MMNS 2009 intends to continue the success of the outstanding agendas of the past, and will emphasize and solicit novel research in the management of wired-wireless multimedia networks and services.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Management of multimedia streaming and real-time service delivery
• Management of wireless ad-hoc/mesh networks
• Management of NGN/4G networks and services
• Management of sensor and actuator networks
• Management of Service Oriented Architectures
• Middleware for the management of mobile multimedia services
• Middleware support for seamless mobility of multimedia services
• Multi-service/multiple-play over IP (voice, video, data and mobility over IP) network management
• Grid networking for multimedia
• Cross-layer management
• Multimedia in peer-to-peer networks
• Quality of service management in multimedia and mobile networks
• Planning and optimization of multimedia and mobile networks
• IP Multimedia System (IMS) operations and management
• Management of service delivery platforms
• Management of content distribution networking
• Distributed multimedia service management
• Performance evaluation of multimedia and mobile services
• Wireless/mobile multimedia broadcast/multicast technologies
• Novel protocols for multimedia services
• Multi-point and multicast service management
• Pricing, accounting, and billing for multimedia services
• Management of trust and security for mobile and multimedia networks and services
• Self-* properties of multimedia and mobile networks and services
• Network virtualization for network management and service provisioning
• Remote over-the-air manageability in mobile networks
• End-to-end management for multimedia transmission in mobile/wireless networks
• Mobile platform architecture optimizations for management services
• Network manageability across heterogeneous wireless networks
• Novel network architectures for mobile network management services

SUBMISSION

Paper submissions must present original and unpublished research work or experiences. Late-breaking advances and work-in-progress reports from ongoing research are also encouraged for submission to MMNS 2009. Papers under review elsewhere MUST NOT be submitted to MMNS 2009. Authors are requested to submit either long papers or short papers (work-in-progress reports), strictly in LNCS format (see below):

• Long papers (up to 12 single-spaced single-column pages)
• Short papers describing work-in-progress (up to 6 single-spaced single-column pages)

Submissions exceeding the above mentioned paper size will not be reviewed and will be returned to the authors. Please see Submission for detailed instructions.

PROCEEDINGS

The MMNS 2009 proceedings will be published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. For more information regarding manuscript format please visit the authors' instruction links at LNCS Springer. Awards will be presented to the best paper and to the best student paper at the conference. Furthermore, the best papers of MMNS 2009 will be invited to be submitted as extended versions to the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management - TNSM.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

• Paper registration and submission: May 8, 2009
• Author notification: June 30, 2009
• Camera ready papers due: July 18, 2009
• Workshop: October 26-30, 2009

P2P Streaming Protocols at IETF v2

I recently blogged about P2P Streaming Protocols at IETF. Now the slides of this bar BoF meeting are available here. The minutes one can find on the list archives for those who are not subscribed. It is difficult to draw real conclusions at this point in time as much things are not yet clear enough. From the meeting minutes one can extract "still have uncertainties of the goal of PPSP", "PPSP should "narrow" its scope", and "proceed with a proper BOF at the next IETF". Thus, it is suggested to work "on an architecture document covering different components and analyze each components wrt to the work done or current being work upon by other WG in IETF".

9th Workshop on Multimedia Metadata (WMM'09)

Mathias already blogged about it but I also would like to give a short summary about this event. This time the workshop of the multimedia metadata community took place in Toulouse co-located with CORESA. The final program includes papers related to content-based multimedia retrieval & metadata, mobile services, multimedia metadata management, and a doctoral symposium. Proceedings are online available here. The keynote was from Timo Ojala (Oulu university) about case studies on context-aware mobile multimedia services. I've also presented a paper and gave a keynote - together with Stephane Pateux - about MPEG standards: where are we today? My part (i.e., systems) of the presentation I've included here...

MPEG (Systems) standards: where are we today?

View more presentations from Christian Timmerer.

P2P Streaming Protocols at IETF

It seems that the IETF is starting to form a P2P Streaming Protocols activity as there will be a BoF meeting during 74th IETF in San Francisco in March 2009. The agenda covers the following items:

• Problem Statement
• Protocol Requirements
• Protocol Analysis of PPlive and PPStream by Interent Measurement
  
• Introduction of Distributed Services Network, a vision of making PPSP and P2PSIP into reality

Furthermore, it seems that China Mobile and Huawei Technologies are the driving forces behind this exciting activity. There's also an email reflector to which one can subscribe here. I've just subscribed an I'm eager to learn more about what's going on there...

Multimedia Delivery in the Future Internet

After I've written the blog about Future Internet and Next Generation Networks I remembered that I've recently co-authored a similar paper. It was entitled "Multimedia Delivery in the Future Internet - A Converged Network Perspective" and it was published as a white paper of the Media Delivery Platforms Cluster. This white paper is available here and dated back in October 2008, i.e., still worth reading it ;-)

At the beginning it provides an overview of the market environment & business motivations before introducing the multimedia content in the future internet, namely 3D content, multi-view video coding, H.265, and MPEG/LaSER. This was the time when HVC was not yet born.

Next, converged networks are presented followed by cross-layer adaptation for enriched perceived Quality of Service (PQoS). I contributed to the latter, specifically with cross-layer optimization/adaptation techniques and how MPEG-21 could help to increase the level of interoperability.

Finally, this white paper also describes means for multimedia rights management.

Future Internet and Next Generation Networks

... is the title of a new publication from the European Commission paving the way for a Future Internet and 3D Internet. The full title is as follows "Future Internet and NGN Design requirements and principles for a Future Media and 3D Internet" can be downloaded here.

At the beginning it highlights important aspects of Future Media Experiences which are scalability, media access, interaction, content integrity and trust, traffic engineering and bandwidth, social media and networks, collaborative authoring, and mixed reality.

Next, Future Internet Design Requirements are described in clustered into content-centric engineering, content-centric network design (content-centric routing and findability), design for tussle, trustworthiness, and flexibility. This section is followed by the Future Internet Design Principles covering KISP (Keep It as Simple as Possible), design for tussle (remark: again), and sustainability.

Finally, the paper confronts the Future Internet with the Next Generation Network paradigm.

Check it out ...

P2P News from IETF

As some people know the IETF is taking some actions w.r.t. the standardization of protocols related to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology within ALTO and P2PSIP groups. Recently, two new drafts have been submitted which might be interesting to some of you:

The first one is entitled An Architecture of ALTO for P2P Applications with the following abstract: ALTO enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network application software distributors to work jointly and cooperatively to reduce network resource consumption and to improve application performance. In this document, we specify an architecture for integrating ALTO into peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.

The second one is related to P4P Protocol Specification: Provider Portal for Network Applications (P4P) is a framework that enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network application software developers to work jointly and cooperatively to optimize application communications. The goals of this cooperation are to reduce network resource consumption and to accelerate applications. To achieve these goals, P4P allows ISPs to provide network information and guidance to network applications, allowing clients to exchange data more effectively. This document specifies the P4P protocol operations and message formats. The goal is provide a formal specification for developers to create inter-operable implementations.

Please note that latter is mainly driven by Yale University and is in competition with the so-called Oracle Service developed by an institute of the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, namely the research group of Anja Feldmann. I wonder whether they will start/join the "standardization war".

How to Write an RTP Payload Format

draft-ietf-avt-rtp-howto-06

Abstract: This document contains information on how to best write an RTP payload format. Reading tips, design practices, and practical tips on how to quickly and with good results produce an RTP payload format specification. A template is also included with instructions that can be used when writing an RTP payload format.

If you're looking forward to write an RTP payload format, I guess this document may be helpful unless you're an IETF RTP playload format guru ;-) If you're not sure, here's the definition of an RTP playload format:

"The RTP Payload format specifies how a specific media format is put into the RTP Payloads. Thus enabling the format to be used in RTP sessions."

Overall, a useful document and check out the references section for a list of existing payload formats.

Not All Packets Are Equal

... is the title of a IEEE Internet Computing article comprising two parts.

Part 1 - Streaming Video Coding and SLA Requirements - describes the some Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics (i.e., delay, jitter, packet loss) and details some of the coding principles adopted in MPEG standards (and btw. others): subsampling, intra coding, inter coding, blocks, macroblocks, slices, frames, group of pictures (GoPs), decoding order vs. transmission order, and MPEG encapuslation within IP.

Part 2 - The Impact of Network Packet Loss on Video Quality - highlights the impact that different durations of IP packet loss have on the Quality of Experience (QoE) for IP-based video streaming services. It describe the visual impairments that result from such packet losses and present the results of testing and analysis to compare impairments for different loss durations for both MPEG-2-encoded standard and high-definition services.

Both arcticles are a very good starting point to get an overview of video coding and how to stream video data over IP-based networks. However, it mainly focuses on MPEG-2 and only mentions the current state-of-the-art codec, namely Advanced Video Coding (AVC). There are already papers available that investigate the impact of packet loss on video quality for AVC.

Nevertheless, the two papers are worth reading, written in an easy-to-read style, and also suitable for an audience not so familiar with video coding and transmission issues. Finally, it seems that there's another article planned in this series as indicated in the last sentence:

"In a future article, we hope to compare different network technology approaches for minimizing and recovering from video packet loss."

I'm looking forward to that ... (and please, bring more on AVC) -- thanks!

References

• J. Greengrass, J. Evans, A. C. Begen, "Not All Packets Are Equal, Part I: Streaming Video Coding and SLA Requirements," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 70-75, Jan./Feb. 2009
• J. Greengrass, J. Evans, A. C. Begen, "Not All Packets Are Equal, Part 2: The Impact of Network Packet Loss on Video Quality," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 74-82, Mar./Apr. 2009