Distributed Multimedia and Networks (CSC5480)

Student/Faculty Expectations on Teaching and Learning

Instructor: John C.S. Lui

In this course, we will study some of the recent issues in distributed multimedia information systems, wireless communication and mobile computing. This course is intended to be research and seminar oriented and therefore, paper presentation is necessary. I have compiled a list of papers from the latest conferences, journals and technical reports. I will first present some lectures and papers in these areas during the course, students will have to present some other assigned papers. Some of the topics include overview of multimedia technology and trends, multimedia storage servers design, multimedia network architectures and protocols, operating system support for multimedia applications, multimedia databases and application protocols such as distributed media synchronization.

Note that various mathematical techniques will be introduced in this course such as stochastic analysis, game theory...etc.

Course Grades: To be decided.

Course Schedule: Monday 9:30 AM to 12:15 PM (LSB C4, LSB C3), Tuesday 10:30-11:15 AM (SC L3)

The tentative topics for distributed multimedia systems are :

• Game theory and performance evaluation analysis techniques.
• I/O and storage devices
• simulation tools: csim and ns-2
• design, analysis and implementation of continuous media server
• mixed workload continuous media server
• multimedia issues in the current Internet
• network traffic characterization
• Inter-domain routing
• fair queueing
• differentiated service: proportional delay differentiated service
• multicast, anycast and multicast overlays
• issues in server selection
• wireless: ad-hoc, mobility management, reliable wireless multicast, security
• TCP: theory and modeling
• network calculus
• multiple paths multimedia delivery

Project

Project for 2001 (TCP Congestion Control, Active Queue Management and Differentiated Services)

Lecture Notes

Lecture 1 (Storage and I/O devices)

Lecture 2 (Clustered RAID, Performance & Fault Tolerant Design) (reference paper)

Lecture 3 (Introduction to the Design of Video-on-Demand Systems)

Lecture 4 (Optimzation Issues in VOD Systems) (reference paper)

Lecture 5 (Data Sharing Techniques in VOD Systems) (reference paper)

Lecture 6 (Scheduling of Mixed Workloads in VOD Systems)

Lecture 7 (RMSS: The Good, the bad and the ugly)

Lecture 8 (Fault Tolerance Issues in VOD Systems) (reference paper)

Lecture 9a (Fundamental Design Issues for the Future Internet) (reference paper)

Lecture 9b (Internet Bottlenecks: the case for Edge Delivery Services) (reference paper)

Lecture 9c (Selecting an Internet Content Delivery Service for Streaming Media) (reference paper)

Lecture 9d (The Inktomi Overlay Solution for Streaming Media Broadcasts) (reference paper)

Lecture 10 (Fluid-based Analysis of a Network of AQM Routers Supporting TCP Flows with an Application to RED) (reference paper)

runde2.m (Matlab driver's program for activating 40 TCP flows with an AQM router)

vdpol2.m (Matlab function for setting up stochastic differential equations for runde2.m)

runde3.m (Matlab driver's program to activate and disable 40 TCP flows with an AQM router)

vdpol3.m (Matlab function for setting up stochastic differential equations for runde3.m)

p.m (Matlab function for computing dropping probability for early random detection (RED))

try40tcp.mdl (Simulink program under Matlab for testing 40 TCP flows going through a RED router)

red.m (packet dropping probability for try40tcp.mdl under Simulink)

TCP40_ON_OFF.mdl (Simulink program for 60 TCPs wherein 20 flows will be off at 70s and will come back on at 120s.)

Lecture 11 (What do packet dispersion techniques measure? ) (reference paper)

Lecture 12 (Scheduling and QoS ) (Reference: Chapter 9: An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking by Keshav)

Lecture 13a (Proportional Differentiated Service: Delay Differentiation and Packet Scheduling) (Reference: Dovrolis's paper in Sigcomm'99)

Lecture 13b (Adaptive Proportional Delay Differentiated Services: Charaterization and Performance Evalaution) (Reference paper)

Lecture 14 (Parity-Based Loss Recovery for Reliable Multicast Transmission) (Reference paper)

Lecture 15 (Network Calculus)

Lecture 16a (On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic) (reference paper)

Lecture 16b (On the Relevance of Long-Range Dependence in Network Traffic) (reference paper)

Lecture 16c (Self-Similarty in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes) (reference paper)

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NS2 (Tutorial Slide 1: by Alix Chow) (gzipped postscript)

NS2 (Tutorial Slide 2: by Ah Tai) (gzipped tarfile)

NS2 (Tutorial Slide 3: by Patrick Lee) (gzipped postscript)