The future of data communications will critically depend on new technical advances that can integrate into wireline infrastructure a large variety of wireless services such as wireless LAN, cellular networks, and wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In order to provide high quality services ubiquitously and flexibly, wireless data services must often bridge the last critical link. Compared to traditional voice services over cellular networks, emerging mobile services such as multimedia streaming, gaming, and real-time visualization require low latency, low jitter, and high bandwidth connectivity end-to-end across heterogeneous networks. The new wireless Internet and modern applications challenge the underlying assumptions of the current protocol and network architecture.

The goal of the MINESTRONE project is to design and develop light-weight, intelligent agents, called enablers, to support emerging applications across heterogeneous transit networks. Since multimedia streaming is highly demanding in terms of bandwidth, delay and jitter constraints, it is considered a representative workload to drive the design of MINESTRONE. The enablers are strategically located in the wireless as well as fixed networks to continuously monitor the routing dynamics and channel quality, detect faults, and automate service restoration/recovery. The enablers, working in collaboration or in isolation, provide services that are not otherwise possible for endpoint-only streaming system.

Figure 1. MINESTRONE System Architecture

We have pursued the following research tasks in the MINESTRONE project:

• Multi-Source Multi-Path Streaming over Wireless Mesh Networks
  We consider the scenario of wireless mesh networks where multipath diversity could be leveraged to combat interference and time-varying channel quality. We study concurrent video streaming with error protection in this scenario.

• Mobility- and Energy-aware Peer Selection and Rate Allocation
  Our approach takes into account node mobility pattern and energy conservation issues in our peer selection and rate allocation schemes for multi-source streaming session.

• Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Caching
  We revisit the video caching problem in wireless LAN environment and propose a data-selection strategy (i.e., which data units to cache) based on rate-distortion optimization framework.

• Multi-Source Video Streaming Over Wireless LANs
  This work strives to combine the advantages of two communication modes offered by IEEE 802.11 networks: infrastructure and ad hoc modes. MINESTRONE enables a wireless client to selectively stream video contents from a joint sender group, composed by nearby wireless peers and potentially video server on the wired Internet. We formulate the streaming scheme as a combinational optimization problem and compare proxy vs. receiver-driven approach to the transmission scheduling problem.

• Cross-layer Optimization for Multimedia Streaming over Internet
  This work examines how timely feedbacks from network layer can be exploited to optimize the design of source/channel coding and transmission schemes for multimedia streaming over the Internet, as well as wireless networks. Such cross-inspection of multiple layers (application, transport, network & data-link) is necessary to find vertically integrated solutions.

People

Publications

• D. Li, C-N. Chuah, G. Cheung, and S. J. B. Yoo, "Peer-to-Peer Assisted Video Streaming Over IEEE802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks," book chapter, to appear in Broadband Mobile Multimedia: Techniques and Applications, Auerbach Publications, CRC Press, 20pp, March 2008.

• D. Li, C-N. Chuah, G. Cheung, and S. J. Ben Yoo, "Energy-Aware Multi-Source Video Streaming," IEEE ICME, July 2006. [pdf]

• D. Li, Q. Zhang, C-N. Chuah, and S. J. Ben Yoo, "Multi-Source Multi-Path Video Streaming over Wireless Mesh Networks," IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), May 2006. [pdf]

• D. Li, Q. Zhang, C-N. Chuah, and S. J. Ben Yoo, "Error Resilient Concurrent Video Streaming over Wireless Mesh Networks," Packet Video Workshop, April 2006. [pdf]

• C. Dana, D. Li, D. Harrison, and C-N. Chuah, "BASS: BitTorrent Assisted Streaming System for Video-On-Demand," IEEE Intl. Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) October 2005. [pdf]

• D. Li, C-N. Chuah, G. Cheung, and S. J. Yoo, "MUVIS: Multi-Source Video Streaming for Video-on-Demand over IEEE 802.11 WLAN," Journal of Communications and Networks - Special Issue on Towards the Next Generation Mobile Communications, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 144-156, June 2005. [pdf]

• D. Li, C-N. Chuah, G. Cheung, and S. J. Yoo, "'Proxy-driven rate-distortion optimized video streaming over wireless network using asynchronous clocks," IEEE Packet Video Workshop, December 2004. [pdf]

• D. Li, G. Cheung, C-N. Chuah and S. J. Yoo, "Joint Server/Peer Receiver-Driven Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Streaming Using Asynchronous Clocks," IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Oct. 2004. [pdf]

• G. Cheung, C-N. Chuah, and D. Li, "Optimizing Video Streaming Against Transient Failures and Routing Instability," IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), June 2004. [pdf]

Talks/Posters

• "MINESTRONE: Mobile Infrastructure Enablers for Streaming Optimization and New Services," presented at the UC-Berkeley DSP Seminar, March 2005 (invited talk). [ppt]

• "MINESTRONE: Mobile Infrastructure Enablers for Streaming Optimization & New Services", presented at UCD Industrial Affiliate Conference, January 2005. [ppt]

• "Proxy-Driven Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Streaming Over Wireless Network Using Asynchronous Clocks", presented at Packet Video Workshop, December 2004. [ppt]

• "Joint Server/Peer Receiver-Driven Rate-Distortion Optimized Video Streaming Using Asynchronous Clocks", presented at IEEE ICIP, October 2004. [ppt]

Acknowledgement

This project is supported by Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, and UC Micro Program.