TGI_S08: Quality of Service in Network Communications
Guest Lecturer: Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar()
Motivation:Rich media communications over Internet and wireless networks are exploding. We talk to our friends using Skype; download movies from Netflix; stream news from websites such as CBSNews.com; stream TV shows and movies from websites such as hulu.com; view user-created content on YouTube; and watch peer-to-peer television using CoolStreaming, PPLive, and Joost. These communications also enable life-enhancing applications such as remote-teaching and telemedicine. However, to enable these various services to become truly ubiquitous and operate transparently, multiple networked devices and applications need to simultaneously compete for the scarce resources of, for instance, wireless networks.In this course, we consider these novel applications and the unprecedented theoretical challenges for next generation communication systems’ designs due to their time-varying bandwidth requirements, stringent delay deadlines, and dynamic characteristics, and due to the informationally-decentralized environments in which they need to operate.
Brief Description:
This course covers the key concepts, principles and algorithms used in state-of-the-art real-timecommunications and networking. Due to their flexible and low cost infrastructure, both the Internet and wireless channels are currently enabling a variety of delay-sensitive transmission applications. However, these channels provide dynamically varying resources with only limited support for the Quality of Service (QoS) required by the delay-sensitive, bandwidth-intense and loss-tolerant multimedia applications. This variability of resources does not significantly impact delay-insensitive applications (e.g., file transfers), but has considerable consequences for multimedia streaming and networking applications and leads to entirely new challenges.
Traditional concepts, theories and solutions that have dominated information theory, communications and signal processing areas are not suited for dynamic channel characteristics, delay-sensitive applications and multi-user transmission environments. In particular multimedia communication and networkingwill be considered, which has emerged as a very active and challenging cross-disciplinaryresearch topic across the borders of networking, communications, signal processing, systems and optimization, and requires its own set of fundamental concepts, theory and algorithms. A key example of this cross-disciplinary area is cross-layer design, on which this course will put a significant emphasis.
Topics included:
The lectures focus on the fundamental concepts, theory and principles, while presenting illustrative examples and demonstrations of existing algorithms and deployed systems.In this course, the students will gain knowledge and hands-on experience on:
Delay-sensitive communications and networking: Challenges, Problem Space and Applications
Cross-layer design – principles, formalism and methodology
A systematic framework for cross-layer optimization
Defining actions, states, utility functions, interlayer communication for dynamic cross-layer design
Communication decisions under known and unknown environmental dynamics
Joint source-channel coding revised: new decomposition and separation principles for multi-scale cross-layer optimization in wireless multimedia communications
Error Control and Processing for Multimedia over Packet Networks (with and without feedback)
Multimedia traffic models, channel models, performance modeling and evaluation
Bitstream shaping methods for multimedia streaming (rate control, traffic shaping, transcoding, etc.)
New transport protocol designs for delay-sensitive media streaming
Resource allocation concepts and methods for multi-user multimedia communications
Advanced topics in multimedia research:Peer-to-peer multimedia communications (CoolStreaming, PPLive, and Joost), Real-time media streaming, Videoconferencing applications (Skype, GoogleChat), Coding and streaming over overlay networks, Multimedia transmission over mesh networks, Power-constrained wireless multimedia streaming(streaming to cellphones and portable devices), Multi-user resource management for multimedia communication
Pre-requisites: There are no pre-requisites for this course.
Biographical info:
Mihaela van der Schaar is Chancellor’s Professor of ElectricalEngineering at University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her researchinterests include engineering economics and game theory, dynamicmulti-user networks and system designs, wireless networks, onlinelearning, multimedianetworking, communication, processing, and systems, and stream mining.
She is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Lecturer of theCommunications Society for 2011-2012, the Editor in Chief of IEEETransactions on Multimedia and a member of the Editorial Board of theIEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing. She received anNSF CAREER Award (2004), the Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactionson Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2005), the OkawaFoundation Award (2006), the IBM Faculty Award (2005, 2007, 2008), theMost Cited Paper Award from EURASIP: Image Communications Journal(2006), the Gamenets Conference Best Paper Award (2011) and the 2011IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award Best Paper Award.She received three ISO awards for her contributions to the MPEG videocompression and streaming international standardization activities,and holds 33 granted US patents. For more information about herresearch visit: