IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Multimedia Economics for Future Networks: Theory, Methods and Applications

IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Multimedia Economics for Future Networks: Theory, Methods and Applications

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Multimedia data are becoming the dominant source of traffic in the Internet and wireless networks. However, this trend creates serious challenges resulting from the explosive growth of ultra-high-definition video services and bandwidth-expensive applications, not to mention issues in networking/content delivery networks (CDN) and storage/cloud costs. Multimedia today is tightly coupled with economic issues, and profound changes need to be made in order to accommodate diversified network deployments, traffic dynamics, commercial structures, and economic viability within the ecosystem. Such considerations have brought together experts to study cost-effective technologies and profit-driven applications in this setting. Example applications include the tradeoff between costs and Quality of Experience (QoE) for cloud computing providers, economic resource utilization (e.g., spectrum, bandwidth, power control via pricing, and game theoretic and auction mechanisms), and revenue management for both service providers and network operators. However, there is a gap between theory and practice in bringing together multimedia and economics. Therefore, this special issue highlights economic models in multimedia communications and calls for state-of-the-art contributions across multidisciplinary boundaries as well as academia-industry gaps. These advanced economic techniques will reexamine the mathematical foundations of multimedia, beyond classical models and solution concepts, and eventually provide new visions of networks supporting multimedia traffic. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Theoretical foundations for economic multimedia communication
• Equilibria that capture the multimedia features of emerging video applications
• Economic modeling for video coding/transmission over heterogeneous networks
• Models and tools for video services in two-sided markets
• Value-added video services in Internet or mobile data markets
• Performance profiling of economic mechanisms for multimedia sources in future networks
• Pricing schemes for video services in future heterogeneous networks
• Optimization for multimedia services in heterogeneous networks
• Edge computing for Internet of Things (IoT) multimedia communication
• Social IoT: Multimedia transmission, distribution, and storage design
• Methodologies for VR/360-degree multimedia transmissions
• Net neutrality and privacy preservation in multimedia networking

IMPORTANT DATES

• Manuscript submission: 10/1/2018
• First review complete: 1/15/2019
• Acceptance Notification:2/15/2019
• Camera-ready version: 3/15/2019
• Publication:  Second Quarter 2019

GUEST EDITORS
Prof. Wen Ji (Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.)
Prof. Zhu Li (University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA.)
Prof. H. Vincent Poor (Princeton University, USA.)
Prof. Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria & Bitmovin Inc.)
Prof. Wenwu Zhu (Tsinghua University, China)

CFP: Computer Networks Journal Special Issue: Architectures and Protocols for the Future Internet

The Internet architecture has been remarkably successful in allowing a planet-scale internetwork to form. However, the architecture has been losing its original simplicity and transparency as new classes of applications, business models, security mechanisms, scalability enablers and operational and management requirements have given rise to point solutions that extend the architecture without regard to its original design principles.

Consequently, the research community has been actively looking for new approaches to evolve or supersede the Internet architecture. Substantial academic efforts in Europe, the Americas and Asia, as well as within the vendor and network operator communities have resulted in promising proposals to address the limitations of the current Internet architecture.

This special issue of the Computer Networks Journal solicits original, high-quality papers that present, analyze and discuss revolutionary "clean slate" or evolutionary "dirty slate" Internet architectures, "future-proofing" improvements to current Internet protocols, especially at the internetworking, routing, transport and application layers, or new internetworking components that integrate into the existing architecture. Related topics, such as measurement studies or mathematical models that analyze and quantify Internet scalability issues, studies into architectural design principles that enable evolution, interworking technologies with the existing Internet, and others are also within the scope of the special issue.

About the Computer Networks Journal Computer Networks is a scientific journal of computer and telecommunications networking published by Elsevier. Computer Networks is an international, archival journal providing a publication vehicle for complete coverage of all topics of interest to those involved in the computer communications networking area. The audience includes researchers, managers and operators of networks as well as designers and implementors.

Submission Format
Submissions should be clearly organized, written in excellent English and must describe original, complete research not published or currently under review by other journals or conferences. Substantially enhanced and extended versions of quality papers presented at conferences or workshops may be submitted with the differences to the previous version clearly described. All submissions will be peer reviewed. The guest editors reserve the right to reject submissions that are clearly out of scope or well below the expected quality for this special journal issue without further review.

Submission Guidelines
Authors must prepare and format their submissions according to the "Guide for Authors" available from http://ees.elsevier.com/comnet/ and submit them online at the same URL, choosing "SI-Future Internet" as the article type. Submissions must be in single-column format, double-spaced, use a font size of at least 11 points, and should not exceed 25 pages including all figures and references.

Guest Editors
Lars Eggert, Nokia Research Center & Aalto University, lars.eggert@nokia.com
Tilman Wolf, University of Massachusetts, wolf@ecs.umass.edu

Editors in Chief
Ian F. Akyildiz, ian@ece.gatech.edu
Harry Rudin, hr@zurich.ibm.com

Important Dates
Paper submission: 2010-4-30
Acceptance notification: 2010-7-16
Final papers: 2010-8-27
Publication: early 2011

Why do we need a Content‐Centric Future Internet?

The EC published a position paper from the Future Content Network which comprises a proposals towards content‐centric Internet architectures. Here's the executive summary...

Executive Summary
The aim of this document is twofold: firstly, to report and analyse the main reasons, which support our claim that the Future Internet will be “Content‐Centric” and secondly to define two alternative solutions for a Future Content‐Centric Internet Architecture following an evolutionary and a clean‐slate approach.

The starting point of our discussion is the reasonable hypothesis that Future Internet will mainly simplify the usability, increase the efficiency, secure the privacy and enhance the media experience of the users (enhanced mobility, really broadband & flexible communications, immersion, enhanced interaction, involvement of all senses and emotions, navigation). New ways of media creation and consumption will emerge, aiming to cover the different human needs and preserve the revenue generation of the various stakeholders. Moreover, new content types will appear, which together with efficient handling, delivery and protection of the content (i.e. static or dynamic, pre‐recorded, cached or live) will be the Future Internet cornerstones. Thus, the content/media and its efficient handling are (in) the heart of the Future Internet.

Taking into account the fact that the current Internet cannot efficiently serve the increasing needs and the foreseen requirements, two Content‐Centric Internet Architectures are proposed: a “Logical Content‐Centric Architecture”, which consists of different virtual hierarchies of nodes with different functionality and an “Autonomic Content‐Centric‐Internet Architecture”, which relies on the completely novel concept of the “content object”.

Yet, the major objective of this position paper is to initiate a debate between all the interested stakeholders with respect to the following three fundamental arguments:

1. Will the Future Internet be Content‐Centric?
2. How a potential Content‐Centric Internet Architecture would look like?
3. Which design principles and requirements would govern such Architecture?

Interesting to see this "content object" concept as it seems to borrow a lot from the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework which aims to enable the transaction of Digital Items among Users. It would be very interesting seeing some of the MPEG-21 concepts being adopted into the Content-Centric Future Internet!

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 ...

SVC, MANE, and the Future of the Internet

What have Scalable Video Coding (SVC), Media-Aware Network Elements (MANEs) and the Future of the Internet in common? Well, in this article, I'm trying to highlight this...

Scalable Video Coding

Scalability in video coding has a long history which started with MPEG-2 (Wikipedia) introducing temporal, spatial, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scalability, and data partitioning. However, as it successor MPEG-4, it lacks of coding efficiency compared to a single layer coded bitstream. With the emergence of the Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard - a joint development between ISO/MPEG and ITU-T (H.264) referred to as Joint Video Team (JVT) - that gained momentum (i.e., AVC is THE state-of-the-art video coding standard with which one has to compare), the JVT tried it again and started working on Scalable Video Coding with the aim to introduce at most 10% coding overhead ... and this goal has been reached! SVC offers three (main) scalability dimensions:

• temporal: frames per second, e.g., 30fps -> 15 fps
• spatial: resolution, e.g., HTDV (1920x1080) -> SDTV (720×576)
• SNR: quality, e.g., 32dB -> 28 dB

The main advantage of SVC is that it allows for extraction of low-quality (i.e., temporal, spatial, SNR) bitstreams by simply discarding portions of the original bitstream whereby the base layer is always compliant to AVC. In the past, we've done some measurements concerning the adaptation of SVC bitstreams utilizing a generic vs. specific approach.

Media-Aware Network Element

A Media-Aware Network Element (MANE) as defined by the IETF RFC3984 is referred to as a network element, such as a middlebox or application layer gateway that is capable of parsing certain aspects of the RTP payload headers or the RTP payload and reacting to the contents. MANEs - in its current state - are tightly aligned with SVC and, thus, allow the adaptation of SVC bitstreams within the network as shown in the figure below (taken from here).
The current status of the RTP payload format for SVC bitstreams can be found here. With SVC and its RTP payload format, it's very simple to deploy an adaptation engine within the network (i.e., the MANE) that adapts the video content according to different terminal capabilities and network characteristics (e.g., HDTV, SDTV, mobile devices).

The Future Internet

The term "Future Internet" comes from the future Internet conference that was held in spring 2008 in Bled, Slovenia and refers to the European Future Internet Portal which serves as the central forum for European activities and discussions on the future of the Internet. Within the Bled Declaration the main challenges towards the Future Internet have been highlighted, among them capabilities for supporting the creation, sharing, locating and delivery of new-media content which indeed is the result of research and development in the area of SVC and MANE respectively. EC-funded projects that are active supporters of the Bled Declaration and utilize SVC and MANE respectively are, for example, P2P-Next and SEA. However, there's still a long, difficult path ahead with a lot of challenges to be addressed, specifically in the area of Quality of Servce/Experience and, thus, adaptation of multimedia content (but that's another story...).

The next event is the Future of the Internet conference in Prague, in May 2009.