
180 Park Ave - Building 103
Florham Park, NJ
iDEAL: Incentivized Cellular Offloading via Auctions
Tae Cho, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Leonid Razoumov, Wei Dong, Swati Rallapalli, Lili Qiu, Yin Zhang
IEEE Infocom 2013 Conference,
2013.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 2012. , 2013-04-14
{The explosive growth of cellular traffic and
its highly dynamic nature often make it prohibitive or even
infeasible for a cellular service provider to provision enough
cellular resources to support the peak traffic demands. The
current best practice is to have the cellular service provider
deploy alternative wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi and
Femtocells, on its own to complement the cellular network.
However, this is not a viable long-term solution due to its
high cost and the problem of wireless interference.
In this paper, we propose iDEAL, a novel auction-based
incentive framework that allows a cellular service provider
to leverage resources from third-party resource owners on
demand by buying capacity whenever needed through reverse
auctions. iDEAL has several distinctive features: (i)
iDEAL explicitly accounts for the diverse spatial coverage
of different resources and can effectively foster competition
among third-party resource owners in different regions, resulting
in significant savings for the cellular service provider.
(ii) iDEAL provides revenue incentives for third-party resource
owners to participate in the reverse auction and be
truthful in the bidding process. (iii) iDEAL is provably efficient.
(iv) iDEAL effectively guards against collusion. (v)
iDEAL effectively copes with the dynamic nature of traffic
demands. In addition, iDEAL has several useful extensions
that address various important practical issues.
Extensive evaluation based on real traces from a large US
cellular service provider clearly demonstrates the effectiveness
of our approach. We further demonstrate the feasibility
of iDEAL using a prototype implementation.}

Optimizing Cloud Resources for Delivering IPTV Services through Virtualization
Vaneet Aggarwal, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Vinay Vaishampayan
Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia: Cloud-Based Mobile Media: Infrastructure, Services,
2013.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 2012. , 2013-01-01
{Virtualized cloud-based services can take advantage of statistical
multiplexing across applications to yield significant cost savings. However, achieving similar savings with real-time services can be a challenge. In this paper, we seek to lower a provider's costs for real-time IPTV services through a virtualized IPTV architecture and through intelligent time-shifting of selected services.
Using Live TV and Video-on-Demand (VoD) as examples, we show that we can
take advantage of the different deadlines associated with each service to effectively multiplex these services. We provide a generalized framework for computing the amount of resources needed to support multiple services, without missing the deadline for any service. We construct the problem as an optimization formulation that uses a generic cost function. We consider multiple forms for the cost function (e.g., maximum, convex and concave functions) reflecting the cost of providing the service. The solution to this formulation gives the number of servers needed at different time instants to support these services. We implement a simple mechanism for time-shifting scheduled jobs in a simulator and study the reduction in server load using real traces from an operational IPTV network. Our results show that we are able to reduce the load by $sim24\%$ (compared to a possible $sim31.3\%$ as predicted by the optimization framework). We also show that there are interesting open problems in designing mechanisms that allow time-shifting of load in such environments.}

Optimizing Cloud Resources for Delivering IPTV Services through Virtualization
Vaneet Aggarwal, Rittwik Jana, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Vinay Vaishampayan
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS (COMSNETS),
2012.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS. , 2012-01-04
{Virtualized cloud-based services can take advantage of statistical multiplexing
across applications to yield significant cost savings to the operator. However,
achieving similar benefits with real-time services can be a challenge. In this
paper, we seek to lower a provider's costs of real-time IPTV services through a
virtualized IPTV architecture and through intelligent time-shifting of service
delivery. We take advantage of the differences in the deadlines associated with
Live TV versus Video-on-Demand (VoD) to effectively multiplex these services.
We provide a generalized framework for computing the amount of resources needed
to support multiple services, without missing the deadline for any service. We
construct the problem as an optimization formulation that uses a generic
cost function. We consider multiple forms for the cost function (e.g., maximum,
convex and concave functions) to reflect the different pricing options. The
solution to this formulation gives the number of servers needed at different time instants to support these
services. We implement a simple mechanism for time-shifting scheduled jobs in a
simulator and study the reduction in server load using real traces from an
operational IPTV network. Our results show that we are able to reduce the load
by $sim24\%$ (compared to a possible $sim31\%$). We also show that there
are interesting open problems in designing mechanisms that allow time-shifting
of load in such environments.}

Managing Cellular Congestion Using Incentives
Yih Chen, Rittwik Jana, Daniel Stern, Alexander Varshavsky, Bin Wei, Jagadeesh Dyaberi, Karthik Kannan, Vijay Pai
IEEE Communications Magazine - Special Issue on Communications Network Economics,
2012.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 2012 , Volume 50, Issue 11, 2012-10-01, http://www.comsoc.org/commag/
{Mobile data traffic is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years due to the explosive growth of Mobile Web and video traffic on smartphones.
Wireless operators have invested heavily to make infrastructural improvements by installing new cell towers and offloading cellular data traffic to Wi-Fi to resolve congestion. They are also exploring the use of behavioral and economic interventions to manage congestions. To understand the role of interventions, we distributed smartphones to students at Purdue University,
loaded with applications to perform monitoring and location tracking with user consent. We conducted two experiments: first with 14 phones of one type, then with 30 phones of two types. Wi-Fi traffic and cellular network data usage were collected and analyzed to characterize and quantify the changes in usage behaviors; the second experiment also captured location data during compliance/non-compliance to incentive messages. The trial seeks not only to experiment with incentives and disincentives to observe their
effectiveness, but also to understand current mobile broadband and Wi-Fi usage behaviors in a campus environment. Our results indicate a high level of compliance with economic incentives and disincentives.
Detailed analysis further showed correlation with two psychological measures of each user (agreeableness and neuroticism). In addition, we found schemes with probabilistic payments of higher incentive amounts getting more positive results compared to schemes with definite payments with lower incentive amounts - despite similar total payout.}

Joint Optimal Power Allocation and Base Station and Relay Station Placement in Wireless Relay Networks
Rittwik Jana, Mahmoud Daneshmand, Md Habibul Islam, Zbigniew Dziong, Kazem Sohraby
IEEE International Conference on Information Networking,
2012.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE International Conference on Information Networking. , 2012-02-01
{In this paper, we consider a finite geographic area
with multiple mobile stations (MSs) uniformly distributed within
the area and multiple candidate locations (CLs) for deploying
base stations (BSs) and relay stations (RSs) to serve the MSs.
For this network scenario, we study the joint optimal placement
of BSs and RSs into those CLs and MS and RS power allocations
such that the sum-capacity of the network is maximized while the
target data rate of each MS is achieved. In order to investigate the
energy-efficiency trade-offs between deploying BSs and RSs, we
provide an iterative algorithm which first maximizes the sum-rate
of the network by optimally deploying a certain number of BSs.
Then, the algorithm decreases the number of BSs to be deployed
optimally by one and continues deploying RSs until the same
sum-rate is achieved. The process continues until the number of
optimally deployed BS is 1 and the number of optimally deployed
RSs is less than or equal to the total number of candidate RS
locations. Our numerical results suggest that significant gains in
terms of reduction of total transmitted power can be obtained by
replacing BSs with RSs. However, this gain diminishes when the
number of BSs became too small which makes the BS-RS and
RS-MS distances too large for energy efficient communications.}

Combining Content Analysis of Television Programs with Audience Measurement
David Gibbon, Zhu Liu, Eric Zavesky, DeDe Paul, Deborah Swayne, Rittwik Jana, Behzad Shahraray
IEEE Consumer Communication and Networking Conference, (CCNC),
2012.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference. , 2012-01-15
The definitive version was published in Advertising Research Foundation. , 2012-01-15
Combining content analysis of television programs with quantitative audience measurement can provide insights
into customer reactions to advertisements and program content. This work introduces a system architecture that
incorporates anonymous audience metrics from an operational IPTV environment with metadata from a content-based
analysis of recorded programs. Evaluated on a collection of news programs, the system verifies that events derived
from the audience metrics data stream correspond to media segmentation boundaries such as commercial breaks and
topic changes. An automated system for executing multimodal media segmentation algorithms for commercial break and
topic change detection is also discussed. Better understanding of audience reaction can help IPTV service providers
plan infrastructure investments and help in managing multimedia content delivery networks.

Using Generalized Second Price Auction for Congestion Pricing
Proceedings of IEEE Globecom 2011,
IEEE,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
(c) ACM, 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in 12th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce , 2011-12-05.
The explosive growth of mobile data usage in recent years has caused frequent network congestion in certain areas. Besides adding network capacities, network providers have started looking at ways to shape the usage behavior of consumers through various economic incentives and behavioral interventions, such as the elimination of unlimited data and introduction of a tiered pricing scheme. One issue with most of the current pricing schemes is that the primary metric used for differential prices is the aggregate data consumed by the user; users subscribing to a costlier plan receive no higher bandwidth priority, and the cell tower allocates bandwidth resources to users independent of the subscription plans. This paper examines the use of Generalized Second Price (GSP) auctions in the allocation of channel resources in the packet scheduler of wireless networks, with an aim to achieve better ``welfare'' by allowing those users who are willing to bid higher amounts to secure higher personal throughput on the average, without sacrificing overall system throughput or fairness significantly. Simulation results indicate that our modified Proportional Fair scheduler with Auction (PFauc) algorithm achieves a desired tradeoff among welfare, throughput, and fairness.

Understanding Couch Potatoes: Modeling Interactive Usage of IPTV at large scale
Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Deborah Swayne, Vinay Vaishampayan
IMC 2011,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
ACM Copyright
(c) ACM, 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IMC 2011, 2011-11-02.
{We investigate how consumers view content using Video on
Demand (VoD) in the context of an IP-based video distribution
environment. Users today can use advanced stream
control functions like skip and replay in addition to play,
fast-forward, rewind, pause etc., to interactively control their
viewing. Such stream control, however, places additional
demands on the distribution infrastructure (servers, network,
and set top boxes) and can be challenging to manage with a
large subscriber base. A model of user-interaction is useful
to provide key insights on their impact on server and bandwidth
requirements, client responsiveness, etc.
We capture user activity in their natural setting of viewing
video at home. We first develop a model for the arrival
process of requests for content. We then develop two stream
control models that accurately capture user interaction. We
show that stream control events can be characterized by a finite
state machine and a sojourn time model, parametrized
for major periods of usage (weekend and weekday). Our
semi-Markov (SM)model for the sojourn time in each stream
control state uses a novel technique based on a polynomial fit
to the logarithm of the Inverse CDF. A second Constrained
model (CM) uses a stick-breaking approach familiar in machine
learning to model the individual state sojourn time
distributions. The SM model seeks to preserve the sojourn
time distribution for each state while the CM model puts a
greater emphasis on preserving the overall session duration
distribution. Using traces across a period of 2 years from
a large-scale operational IPTV environment we validate the
proposed model and show that we are able to faithfully predict
the workload presented to a video server. We also provide
a synthetic trace developed from the model enabling
researchers to also study other problems of interest.}

Scalable Geocasting for Vehicular Communications
Rajesh Panta, Rittwik Jana, Robert Hall, Josh Auzins, Vaneet Aggarwal
IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, 2011,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, 2011. , 2011-11-14
{This paper presents GeoVCom, a robust geocast
protocol for vehicular networks. GeoVCom allows a vehicle to
send geocast messages to all vehicles in a given geographical area
without the sender having any knowledge about which vehicles
are present in that area. GeoVCom is ad hoc, scalable and can
handle communications under a wide variability of traffic load.
We investigate the performance of GeoVCom in both simulation
and real world tests using an implementation running on smart
phones. Our field deployment and simulation results show that
the number of transmissions per geocast message is kept low,
significantly outperforming conventional flooding algorithms and
at the same time maintaining a high (over 90%) success rate.}
Network Selection for Secondary Users in Cognitive Radio Systems
Chonggang Wang, Kazem Sohraby, Rittwik Jana, Lusheng Ji, Mahmoud Daneshmand
INFOCOM 2011,
2011.
[BIB]
{Measurement studies have shown that uneven and
dynamic usage patterns by the primary users of license based
wireless communication systems often lead to temporal and
spatial spectrum underutilization. This provides an opportunity
for secondary users (SU) to tap into underutilized frequency
bands provided that they are capable of cognitively accessing
the networks without colliding or impacting the performance of
the primary users (PU). When there are multiple networks with
spare spectrum, secondary users can opportunistically choose the
best network to access, subject to certain constraints. In cognitive
radio systems, this is referred to as the network selection problem
for secondary users.
This paper first formulate a Markov queuing model to obtain
the maximum allowable arrival rate of secondary users subject to
a target collision probability for the primary users. Based on this
model, a Collision-Constrained Network Selection (CCNS) method
is proposed to maximize secondary users throughput subject to
a given PU collision probability. Two more approaches, referred
as CCNS-Greedy and CCNS-Energy, are designed to furthermore
reduce collision probability and to decrease energy consumption
of secondary users, when the system is underloaded. However,
CCNS strictly relies on PU and SU traffic characteristics such as
inter-arrival time and service time. Then, MEAsurement-based
Networks Selection (MEANS) is proposed to perform network
selection for secondary users based on online measurement of
PU collision probability of each network, with the same objective
to regulate PU collision probability of each network below the
target value. Later, an enhanced MEANS (MEANS+) is designed
to improve SU throughput while not violating the target PU
collision probability. Simulation based extensive performance
evaluation has shown that the proposed schemes achieve the best
performance in terms of resulted PU collision probability, SU
throughput, and SU energy consumption, compared to Random
and Greedy strategies.}

Modeling and Characterization of Large-Scale Wi-Fi Traffic in Public Hot-Spots
Amitabha Ghosh, Rittwik Jana, Vaidyanathan Ramaswami, James Rowland, N Shankaranarayanan
Infocom 2011,
2011.
[BIB]
{Server side measurements from several Wi-Fi hotspots
deployed in a nationwide network over different types of
venues from small coffee shops to large enterprises are used to
highlight differences in traffic volumes and patterns. We develop
a common modeling framework for the number of simultaneously
present customers. Our approach has many novel elements: (a)
We combine statistical clustering with Poisson regression from
Generalized Linear Models to fit a non-stationary Poisson process
to the arrival counts and demonstrate its remarkable accuracy;
(b) We model the heavy tailed distribution of connection durations
through fitting a Phase Type distribution to its logarithm
so that not only the tail but also the overall distribution is
well matched; (c) We obtain the distribution of the number
of simultaneously present customers from an Mt/G/infty queuing
model using a novel regenerative argument that is transparent and
avoids the customarily made assumption of the queue starting
empty at an infinite past; (d) Most importantly, we validate
our models by comparison of their predictions and confidence
intervals against test data that is not used in fitting the models.}

Joint Optimal Power Allocation and Relay Selection with Spatial Diversity in Wireless Relay Networks
Md Habibul Islam, Zbigniew Dziong, Kazem Sohraby, Mahmoud Daneshmand, Rittwik Jana
Mobile VCE Green Radio, Software Defined Radio - Wincomm,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
Wireless Innovation Forum European conference on Communications Technologies and Software Defined Ra Copyright
The definitive version was published in Mobile VCE Green Radio, Software Defined Radio - Wincomm. , 2011-06-23, http://europe.wirelessinnovation.org/mc/page/MobileVCE
{We consider a wireless relay network (WRN) where
multiple mobile stations (MSs) try to send their data to a base
station (BS) either directly or via a set of fixed relay stations
(RSs). For this network, we study the problem of joint optimal
MS and RS power allocation and relay selection with the objective
of minimizing the total transmitted power of the system. The joint
optimization algorithm must satisfy the minimum data demand of
each MS. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear
programming (MINLP) problem and find the solution under
different relaying architectures and spatial diversity schemes. The
optimal solution of the MINLP problem is exponentially complex
due to its combinatorial nature. We use the MATLAB based
commercial software TOMLAB to find a near optimal solution
of the MINLP problem. We also find an approximate solution of
the original problem by applying a simple relay selection scheme
based on the channel gains between MSs and RSs. Numerical
results are presented to show the performance of this simple
scheme with respect to the optimal one in terms of total power
consumption.}

Exploiting Virtualization for Delivering Cloud-based IPTV Services
Vaneet Aggarwal, Xu Chen, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Vinay Vaishampayan
IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Cloud Computing ,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
The definitive version was published in IEEE INFOCOM Cloud Computing Workshop , 2011-04-10
{Cloud computing is a new infrastructure environment
that delivers on the promise of supporting on-demand
services in a flexible manner by scheduling bandwidth, storage
and compute resources on the fly. IPTV services like Video
On Demand (VoD) and Live broadcast TV requires substantial
bandwidth and compute resources to meet the real time requirements
and to handle the very bursty resource requirements
for each of these services. To meet the needs of the bursts of
requests, each with a deadline constraint for both VoD and
LiveTV channel changes, we propose a resource provisioning
framework that allows these services to co-exist on a common
infrastructure by taking advantage of virtualization. We propose
an optimal algorithm that provides the minimum number of
servers needed to fulfill all requests for these services. We prove this
optimality in a general setting for any number of services with
general deadline constraints. By using real world data from an
operational IPTV environment, our results show that anticipating
and thereby enabling the delaying of VoD requests by up to 30
seconds gives significant resource savings even under conservative
environmental assumptions. We also experiment with different
scenarios (by varying the deadline constraints, changing the peak
to average ratios of the constituent services) to compute the
overall savings.}

Characterizing Fairness for 3G Wireless Networks
Vaneet Aggarwal, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Jeffrey Pang, N Shankaranarayanan
IEEE LANMAN 2011,
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
IEEE Copyright
This version of the work is reprinted here with permission of IEEE for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE LANMAN 2011. , 2011-10-13
{The end to end system data performance over a 3G cellular network depends on many factors such as the number of users, interference, multipath propagation, radio resource management techniques as well as the interaction between these mechanisms and the transport protocol's flow and congestion mechanisms. Using controlled experiments in a public cell site, we investigate the interaction between TCP and the 3G UMTS/HSPA network's resource allocation, and its effect on fairness in the throughput achieved across multiple (up to 26) TCP flows in a loaded cell sector. Our field measurement results indicate that TCP fairness fluctuates significantly when the air interface (radio link) is the bottleneck. We also observe that TCP fairness is substantially better when the backhaul link (a fixed wired link) is the bottleneck, instead of the air interface. We speculate that the fairness of TCP flows is adversely impacted by the mismatch between the resource allocation mechanisms of TCP's flow and congestion control and that of the Radio Access Network (RAN).}

Capacity Requirements for On-Demand IPTV Services
Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Pat Diminico, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Deborah Swayne, Vinay Vaishampayan
THE third International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS 2011),
2011.
[PDF]
[BIB]
COMSNETS 2011 Copyright
The definitive version was published in COMSNETS 2011. , 2011-01-05, http://www.comsnets.org/
{Service providers are evolving to provide more video content on-demand. Customers like to watch a variety of entertainment content of their choice and at a time conducive
to their schedules. Catering to this ever-increasing user base requires careful provisioning by the providers to accommodate for both scale and interactivity. In this paper, we examine the usage pattern of several hundreds of thousands of consumers of a nationwide IPTV service, and confirm that viewers are indeed
migrating to what is called �time-shifted� viewing of television programming and movies using digital video recorders or on demand viewing. We also show how users of on-demand content interactively control their viewing experience using �stream control� functions such as fast-forward, rewind, skip, replay, etc. Through careful measurements on an IPTV server, we compute the load due to streaming and handling these stream control events. We then extrapolate from these micro-benchmark
measurement to predict the processing load imposed by users that would resort to using a �network-based� DVR capability if such a service were offered. We use both detailed trace-driven simulations and a simple operational-analysis based model to
predict the capacity requirements of the server complex in the VHO to serve a large population of customers (e.g. a densely populated city like Mumbai). We provide insights on the number of requests serviced by the server, the average time to service
these requests and the response time as perceived by the client.}

Characterizing Interactive Behavior in a Large-Scale Operational IPTV Environment
Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Ralph Knag, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Deborah Swayne, Vinay Vaishampayan
IEEE Infocom 2010,
2010.
[BIB]
{Interactivity is promised by IP-based content distribution, particularly with IPTV. We investigate the user viewing activity for broadcast TV, pre-recorded content using Digital Video Recording (DVR) and video on demand (VoD). Advanced stream control functions (play, pause, skip, rewind, etc.) provide users with a high level of interactivity, but place demands on the distribution infrastructure (servers, network, home-network) that can be difficult to manage at large scale. To support system design as well as network capacity planning, it is necessary to have a good model of user interaction. Using traces from a well-provisioned operational environment with a large user population, we first characterize interactivity for broadcast TV, DVR and VoD. We then develop parametric models of individual users stream control operations for VoD. Our analysis shows that interactive behavior is adequately characterized by two semi-Markov models, one for weekdays and another for weekends. We propose a parametric model for the underlying sojourn time distributions and show that it results in a superior fit compared to well known distributions (generalized Pareto and Weibull). In order to validate that our models faithfully capture user behavior, we compare the workload that a VoD server experiences in response to actual traces and synthetic data generated from our proposed models. }

The Effectiveness of Intelligent Scheduling for Multicast VoD
Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Vaneet Aggarwal, Robert Calderbank, Fang Yu
ACM Multimedia 2009,
2009.
[BIB]
{Multicast has seen a resurgence in the recent past, driven by the need to efficiently disseminate large volumes of real-time content, especially with the growth of IPTV. Video-on-Demand (VoD) delivery by multicasting still remains a challenge. Requests for popular content can be aggregated and served by multicast groups, but it has always been uncertain as to how much aggregation can be achieved. In this paper, we show that combining a good data model and an intelligent scheduler can help us realize significant benefits through multicast. Our design investigates an Earliest Deadline First-like (EDF) scheduler that aims to schedule the transmission of video ``chunks" according to their deadlines over multicast groups. We show through analysis that a dynamic multicast approach we term EDF-D is optimal, and minimizes the number of chunks sent from the VoD server. We use VoD request data from an operational service to quantify the benefit of multicasting and the amount of aggregation. Specifically, we observe a significant reduction in server bandwidth when compared to traditional techniques like unicast (65\%) and cyclic multicast (58\%). Finally, we show that even with 50\% of the requesting users performing some amount of fast forwarding, there is negligible reduction in the amount of aggregation. Version 3 reflects the changes made to conform for the camera ready manuscript for ACM Multimedia 2009 conference. The technical material in this version has only been slightly modified to account for reveiwers' comments. }

CPM: Adaptive VoD with Cooperative Peer Assist and Multicast
Kadangode Ramakrishnan, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Rittwik Jana, Divesh Srivastava, Bobby Bhattacharjee
2008.
[PDF]
[BIB]
{We present CPM, a unified approach that exploits server multicast, assisted by peer downloads, to provide efficient video-on-demand (VoD) in a service provider environment. We describe our architecture and show how CPM is designed to dynamically adapt to a wide range of situations including highly different peer-upload bandwidths, content popularity, user request arrival patterns (including flash-crowds), video library size, and subscriber population. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CPM using simulations (based on the an actual implementation codebase) across the range of situations described above and show that CPM does significantly better than traditional unicast, different forms of multicast, as well as peer-to-peer schemes. Along with synthetic parameters, we augment our experiments using data from a deployed VoD service to evaluate the performance of CPM. Original document was a presentation. This is a paper we have written, and submitted to a conference. The first author has also been changed. }

Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11a wireless LANs in the presence of ultra-wideband interference
Rittwik Jana, Deva Borah, Anastasios Stamoulis
IEEE Wireless Communications Networking Conference, March, 2003,
2003.
[BIB]
{The performance of an 802.11a wireless receiver, in the presence of multiple users transmitting ultra-wideband (UWB) interfering signals, is evaluated. The frequency band of interest for the 802.11a system is 5.21-5.23 GHz. The coexistence of the two systems is characterized in terms of 802.11a receiver's bit error ratesand throughputs. Our simulations indicate that UWB interferes can cause severe degradation in the attainable throughput of the 802.11a system. However, as the UWB interferers move away from the 802.11a receivers, so does their negative effect on the throughput performance of the 802.11a system. }
Personalized Multimedia Services Using A Mobile Service Platform,
Tue Jan 08 14:43:46 EST 2013
A method for providing multimedia data from at least one controllable multimedia source to a mobile device includes providing a request path from the mobile device to a mobile service platform, receiving a request from the mobile device, obtaining a device profile from the mobile device, authenticating the identity of a user of the mobile device, and determining a user profile in response to the user identity. The method further includes authorizing control and access to the at least one multimedia source, providing a control channel from the mobile service platform to at least one multimedia server, providing multimedia data delivery information to the at least one multimedia server, and providing multimedia data to the mobile device in response to the request via the at least one multimedia server.
Limited Chain Relay With Virtual Peer For Multimedia Distribution,
Tue Nov 27 16:12:25 EST 2012
A method includes at a first customer premises equipment (CPE) device coupled to a multimedia distribution network, generating a first request for multimedia content. The method also includes sending the first request to a network node of the multimedia distribution network. The method further includes receiving the multimedia content from a virtual peer located at the network node and storing the multimedia content at the first CPE device. The method also includes receiving a message via the multimedia distribution network, the message indicating a transmission of a second request for the multimedia content by a second customer premises equipment (CPE) device. The method further includes transmitting at least a portion of the stored multimedia content to the second CPE device.
System And Method For Peer To Peer Video Streaming,
Tue Mar 08 16:01:52 EST 2011
In an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) system, an IPTV server is configured to receive a request from an IPTV content storage device (CSD) to view a video stream. The IPTV server selects a set of peers for the IPTV CSD, and transmits the set of peers to the IPTV CSD. In the system, a capacity of a fiber to the node (FTTN) switch in a down linking direction is greater than or equal to a sum of a number of simultaneous viewers supported by the FTTN switch plus a number of viewers that receive video streams from peers in the same community.
Method For Creating And Providing Layered Syndicated Data For Multimedia Content To Users,
Tue May 18 15:50:00 EDT 2010
A layered syndicated feed or content is provided having layers defined according to a media type (e.g., text, graphic, audio, or video) wherein each layer has a plurality of levels such that each level provides either inclusive or exclusive content of the layer's media type in varying degrees of detail or depth. Furthermore, a system is provided for requesting and storing user and mobile device profiles indicative of the syndicated content layers and levels that the user is interested in receiving and that the user's mobile device is capable of receiving.
System And Method Of Collecting, Correlating, And Aggregating Structured Edited Content And Non-Edited Content.,
Tue Aug 25 15:38:00 EDT 2009
A mobile multimedia content aggregation and dissemination platform is provided that aims to automate the creation, collection, correlation, aggregation, and dissemination of RSS, ATOM or other syndicated-style data formats along with non-syndicated content for blogs and for searching by interested parties. Then non-syndicated content may be substantially any type of multimedia content that has not yet been edited or that has been edited. The system and method may receive data content that originated from a syndicated information source along with other data content that originated from a non-syndicated information source. The system and method convert both types of content into, at least, blog information and blog data. The blog information comprising, information that points to a storage location of the blog data. The exemplary method further enables a user to search the blog data regardless of whether the blog data originated from a syndicated data source or non-syndicated data source.
Personalized Multimedia Services Using A Mobile Service Platform,
Tue Jul 28 15:38:00 EDT 2009
A method for providing multimedia data from at least one controllable multimedia source to a mobile device includes providing a request path from the mobile device to a mobile service platform, receiving a request from the mobile device, obtaining a device profile from the mobile device, authenticating the identity of a user of the mobile device, and determining a user profile in response to the user identity. The method further includes authorizing control and access to the at least one multimedia source, providing a control channel from the mobile service platform to at least one multimedia server, providing multimedia data delivery information to the at least one multimedia server, and providing multimedia data to the mobile device in response to the request via the at least one multimedia server.