IEEE JSAC Special Issue: Video Distribution over Future Internet

Special issue on Video Distribution over Future Internet 

Extended Submission Deadline: May 1529, 2015

http://www.comsoc.org/jsac

The current Internet is under tremendous pressure due to the exponential growth in bandwidth demand, fueled by the transfer of video consumption to online distribution, IPTV, streaming services such as Netflix, and from phone networks to videoconferencing and Skype-like video communications. The Internet has also democratized the creation, distribution and sharing of user-generated video contents through services such as YouTube, Vimeo or Hulu. The situation is further aggravated by the emerging trends of adopting higher definition video streams, requesting more and more bandwidth. Indeed, the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) projects that video consumption will amount to 90% of the global consumer traffic by 2017. Another shift predicted by Cisco VNI is that most data communications will be wireless by 2018.

To cope with the bandwidth growth, the shift to wireless, and to solve other related issues (e.g., naming, security, etc) with the current Internet, new architectures for the future Internet have been proposed and prototyped. Examples include Content-Centric Networks (CCN) or Named Data Networking (NDN), or some content-based extensions to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), among others. None of these emerging architectures deals specifically with video distribution, as they need to support a wider range of services, but all would have to support videos in an efficient manner. Therefore, the study of video distribution over the future Internet is of primary importance: how well does future Internet architecture facilitate video delivery? What kind of video distribution mechanisms need to be created to run on the future Internet? How will video be supported in the wireless portion of the future Internet? Can the current video distribution mechanisms (such as end-to-end dynamic rate adaptation schemes) be used or even enhanced for the future Internet? What are subjective/objective metrics for performance measurement? How to provide real-time guarantees for live and interactive video streams?

While the topic is quite wide, we will narrow the focus of this special issue on the fundamental problems of video distribution and delivery in the future Internet. We invite submissions of high-quality original technical and survey papers, which have not been published previously, on video distribution in the future Internet, including the following non-exhaustive list of topics. Please note that all topics must be understood in the context of the future Internet as outlined above.

• Network-assisted video distribution, network support for multimedia, specifically supporting wireless environments
• New information-centric and software-defined architectures to support wired and wireless video streaming
• Resource allocation for wired and wireless video distribution
• Media streaming, distribution, and storage support in the future Internet
• In-network caching/storage, named data retrieval, publish/subscribe for video distribution in wired and wireless networks
• Next generation Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• Adaptive streaming and rate adaptation for video streaming in the future Internet for wired and wireless networks
• Peer-to-peer aspects of video multimedia distribution, including scaling and capacity
• QoS/QoE measurement and support for video distribution in the future Internet
• User-generated content and social networks for multi-media
• Video compression techniques explicitly supporting the future Internet
• Big-Data mechanisms (say referral engines or content placement algorithms) for video content over future Internet
• Social-aware video content distribution over future Internet
• Integration of video distribution and multimedia computing over future Internet
• Testbeds and measurements of video distribution over future Internet
• Cost and economic models for video distribution over future Internet
• Theoretical foundations for video distribution over future Internet, e.g., network coding, information theory, machine learning, etc

Special Issue Editors

• Prof. Cedric Westphal, Huawei Innovations & UCSC, USA 
• Prof. Tommaso Melodia, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA 
• Prof. Christian Timmerer, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
• Prof. Wenwu Zhu, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Important Dates

• Paper Submission due: 05/29/2015
• First review complete: 09/15/2015
• Acceptance Notification: 11/15/2015
• Camera-ready version: 12/15/2015
• Publication date: Second Quarter 2016 

Manuscript submissions and reviewing process: All submissions must be original work that has not been published or submitted elsewhere. For submission format, please follow IEEE JSAC guidelines (http://www.comsoc.org/jsac/paper-submission-guidelines). Each paper will go through a two-round rigorous reviewing process by at least three leading experts in related areas. Papers should be submitted through EDAS (https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=19291).

The Future Media Internet and other related topics

Recently, the IEEE Communication Magazine had a special issue on Future Media Internet which I'd like to review very briefly. First, let's start with titles of the papers from this issue:

1. CURLING: Content-Ubiquitous Resolution and Delivery Infrastructure for Next-Generation Services
2. A Survey on Content-Oriented Networking for Efficient Content Delivery
3. Peer-to-Peer Streaming of Scalable Video in Future Internet Applications
4. Improving End-to-End QoE via Close Cooperation between Applications and ISPs
5. System Architecture for Enriched Semantic Personalized Media Search and Retrieval in the Future Media Internet
6. Automatic Creation of 3D Environments from a Single Sketch Using Content-Centric Networks

From this issue it seems that the Future Media Internet (FMI) is built around the concept of Content-Centric Networking (CCN) or Content-Oriented Networking (CON) - cf. articles #1 and #2 - whereby the latter is referred to as a umbrella term including CCN and others like Data-Oriented Network Architecture (DONA) and Publish-Subscribe Internetworking Routing Paradigm (PSIRP). Probably in this context also the Content-Aware Networking (CAN) approach developed within the ALICANTE project is worth to be mentioned.

Furthermore, it seems that Peer-to-Peer (P2P), Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and Quality of Experience (QoE) - cf. articles #3 and #4 - are very much important for the FMI. While I believe that SVC has some advantages in the context of P2P, I have some doubts about a close co-operation between applications and ISPs unless the applications are offered by the same ISPs. Interestingly, the P2P-Next project and the QUALINET COST action are both working on these topics.

Finally, article #5 proposes a system architecture for enriched semantic personalized search and retrieval and article #3 seems to be an application paper describing the automatic creation of 3D environments from a single sketch in the context of FMI.

In its most recent issue, the IEEE Communication Magazine again had some interesting papers related to the FMI. The special issue on Recent Advances in IETF Standards had three articles worth mentioning in the context of FMI:

1. The Coming Age of MPLS provides a tutorial on MPLS-TP and its usage.
2. Stream Control Transmission Protocol: Past, Current, and Future Standardization Activities describes SCTP and already defined extensions as well as future work in the area of security and concurrent multi-path transport.
3. Internet Geolocation and Location-based Services describing the IETF GEOPRIV architecture.

Next to that, two papers accepted from the open call are very relevant to FMI, namely QoX: What is it really? and Mobile Video Delivery with HTTP. Again, the QoE is a topic but the first time HTTP streaming is mentioned in this context. It's already heavily deployed, we all use it but in most cases the quality is unsatisfactory (even if one pays for such a service).

Thus, I would like to see more papers regarding QoE for HTTP streaming in the context of the Future Media Internet!