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

Guest Editorial

Multimedia Economics for Future Networks: Theory, Methods, and Applications

Authors: Wen Ji, Zhu Li, H. Vincent Poor, Christian Timmerer, and Wenwu Zhu

Abstract: With the growing integration of telecommunication networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G networks, there is a tremendous demand for multimedia services over heterogeneous networks. According to recent survey reports, mobile video traffic accounted for 60 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2016, and it will reach up to 78 percent by the end of 2021. Users’ daily lives are inundated with multimedia services, such as online video streaming (e.g., YouTube and Netflix), social networks (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), IoT and machine generated video (e.g, surveillance cameras), and multimedia service providers (e.g., Over-the-Top (OTT) services). Multimedia data is thus becoming the dominant traffic in the near future for both wired and wireless networks.

W. Ji, Z. Li, H. V. Poor, C. Timmerer and W. Zhu, "Guest Editorial Multimedia Economics for Future Networks: Theory, Methods, and Applications," in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 37, no. 7, pp. 1473-1477, July 2019.
doi: 10.1109/JSAC.2019.2918962

Link: https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2019.2918962

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)

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).