CONCERT: A Context-Adaptive Content Ecosystem Under Uncertainty

Lead Research Organisation: University of Surrey
Department Name: Communications Systems Res CCSR

Abstract

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Description The research team have investigated a wide range of content application scenarios which require different network support in order to achieve assured user experiences against various dynamicity and uncertainty.

Early in the project the research team proposed an intelligent in-network caching scheme for Peer-to-peer (P2P) content chunks, aiming to reduce P2P-based content traffic load and also to achieve improved content distribution performance. Towards this end, the proposed solution uses holistic decision-making logic and takes into account context information on the P2P characteristics such as chunk availability and popularity at different network locations. In addition, we have analysed the benefit of coordination between neighbouring content routers when making caching decisions in order to avoid unnecessarily duplicated nearby P2P chunk caching. An analytical modelling framework has been developed to quantitatively evaluate the efficiency of the proposed in-network caching scheme.

The research team also investigated how user experiences in HTTP/HTTPS based mobile web applications can benefit from mobile edge intelligence. we proposed a simple but effective transport-layer optimization technique which requires necessary context information dissemination from the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) server to user devices where such an algorithm is actually executed. The key novelty in this case is the mobile edge's knowledge about webpage content characteristics which is able to increase downloading throughput for user QoE enhancement. Our experiment results based on a real LTE-A test-bed show that, when the proportion of computation latency varies between 20% and 50% (which is typical for today's webpages), the downloading throughput can be improved up to 34.5%, with reduced downloading time by up to 25.1%. An alternative approach has also been proposed without necessary involvement of network edge intelligence, but instead relying on client's local knowledge about multiple end-to-end QUIC connection conditions. Such a scheme does not introduce additional complexity on the network side, but is still able to achieve substantial performance improvement in both median (up to 59.1%) and 95th completion time (up to 72.3%).

In addition to the mobile web applications, the team also carried out research on QoE-aware mobile video delivery in LTE-A based environment (Joined work with another EPSRC KCN Project - EP/L026120/1). This is in the context of the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) research activities hosted at University of Surrey. The key idea is to leverage on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) to build an intelligent virtual mobile edge which is able to perform context-aware video prefetching and adaptation operations according to different dynamicity on the user side and the network side. Extensive experiments have been carried out based on a real campus-wide LTE-A testing infrastructure at 5GIC, and the results proved the feasibility of successful transmission of QoE-assured 4K video (subject to the availability of radio resources) from any remote video sources in the public Internet up to 300ms round-trip-delay (RTT), which cannot be achievable by any existing schemes due to the behavioural limitation of the TCP transport protocol. In 2019, the proposed solution was also tested for the very first time in the world in a satellite-backhauled 5G network with RTT of 560ms and the proposed scheme in such a challenging environment is able to provide assured content consumption performance for end users.

Last but not least, the project completed the final development and evaluation of the CURLING scheme - an inter-domain ICN architecture initially designed in a previous research project. The solution natively supports inter-domain multicast which had previously remained an unsolved technical hurdle with native IP. In addition, two brand new features of content scoping and filtering allow content service providers to flexibly apply specific policies on the geographical access control over their own content. This is very useful for many content services (e.g. BBC iPlayer Programme as a basic example) requiring restricted content access from any given region(s) in the public Internet.
Exploitation Route The aforementioned research items are directly associated with the 5G research and innovation activities at the University of Surrey since the beginning of the CONCERT project. At the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) hosted at UNIS, there is one dedicated work area titled "User, Content and Network Context", which offers an ideal platform to disseminate the research and development achievements from the CONCERT project towards the 5GIC industrial partners. The current activities on the NFV/MEC enabled mobile video delivery mechanisms will offer comprehensive user quality of experiences enhancements in mobile content consumption applications, and hence we envisage that these techniques for smart handling of mobile content according to changing contexts will become promising solutions to be potentially adopted by 5GIC industrial partners.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
 
Description Some of the research items are directly associated with the 5G research and innovation (5GIC) activities at the University of Surrey since the beginning of the CONCERT project. At the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) hosted at UNIS, there is one dedicated work area titled "User, Content and Network Context", which offers an ideal platform to disseminate the research and development achievements from the CONCERT project towards the 5GIC industrial partners. The current on-going R&D activities context-aware mobile video delivery framework will offer comprehensive user QoE enhancements in mobile content consumption applications. Hence we envisage that these techniques for smart handling of mobile content according to changing contexts will become promising solutions to be potentially adopted by 5GIC industrial partners. By February 2019, the implemented prototype has been demonstrated to a wide variety of audiences, such as: • The Mobile World Congress (MWC) Event at Barcelona 2018. • Invited talk at international standardisation bodies including both ITU-T and ETSI. • Industry companies, including 5GIC partners such as BT, Vodafone, O2, BBC, Huawei, Fujitsu, CableLabs and also other industry visitors including Nokia and Ericsson. • The European Telecommunications Standardisations Institute (ETSI) Next Generation Protocol (NGP) Industry Specification Group during their visit in January 2017. • UK and China government officials (including the Chinese Vice Premier Mr. Ma Kai during his visit to 5GIC in November 2016). The solution has been further investigated in the context of EU 5G-PPP SAT5G project, and the team has demonstrated the feasibility of streaming 4K live video through GEO satellite backhauled 5G network with assured user experiences. The impending arrival of 5G and beyond networks which promise ever-higher data rates and shorter latencies has fostered the emergence of novel applications, such as virtual / augmented reality, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, etc., which require rapid and timely response to information requests regardless of device capabilities and network conditions. Our work on mobile edge cloud addresses exactly this challenge, proposing a framework for optimally allocating resources to different network locations in order to satisfy mobile users who are running applications that are highly resource-hungry and also have stringent response time requirements. Since 2020 the project team started to extend the implemented platform to further support the immersive Holographic Teleportation applications beyond the conventional MPEG video content. It is expected that the extended framework will enable Internet-scale teleportation of live hologram objects with end-to-end user Quality of Experience assurance against dynamic and uncertain network and traffic conditions.
First Year Of Impact 2016
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
Impact Types Societal,Economic
 
Description SPIRIT: SCALABLE PLATFORM FOR INNOVATIONS ON REAL-TIME IMMERSIVE TELEPRESENCE
Amount £8,000,000 (GBP)
Funding ID 101070672 
Organisation European Commission 
Sector Public
Country European Union (EU)
Start 10/2022 
End 09/2025
 
Description Testing the proposed MEC solution for 4K mobile video delivery in LEO satellite backhauled 5G Networks 
Organisation Telesat
Country Canada 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Working with Vodafone and Telesat, a world-renowned company for LEO satellite technologies, the team conducted world's first experiment on 4K/8K video streaming over 5G networks backhauled by LEO satellite. The proposed MEC (mobile edge computing) based video segment prefteching technique was comprehensively evaluated in such an environment.
Collaborator Contribution Telesat provided their operational LEO satellite to be used in this experiment.
Impact Some relevant results were reported in an invited keynote talk at the ITU-T Network 2030 Focus Group workshop in November 2019.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Testing the proposed MEC solution for 4K mobile video delivery in LEO satellite backhauled 5G Networks 
Organisation Vodafone
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Working with Vodafone and Telesat, a world-renowned company for LEO satellite technologies, the team conducted world's first experiment on 4K/8K video streaming over 5G networks backhauled by LEO satellite. The proposed MEC (mobile edge computing) based video segment prefteching technique was comprehensively evaluated in such an environment.
Collaborator Contribution Telesat provided their operational LEO satellite to be used in this experiment.
Impact Some relevant results were reported in an invited keynote talk at the ITU-T Network 2030 Focus Group workshop in November 2019.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Dissemination through ETSI New Internet Forum 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact On October 12th 2018, Prof. Ning Wang was invited to give a talk at the ETSI New Internet Forum at Den Haag in Netherlands. The 4K VoD delivery scheme developed in the CONCERT project was highlighted as a key use case of convergence of 5G (and beyond) and future Internet which is the key topic of the talk. There were around 70 people from both ICT industry and academia.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.etsi.org/events/1322-etsi-new-internet-forum
 
Description Dissemination through ITU Telecommunication (ITU-T) Standardization Focus Group of Network 2030 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact On October 2nd 2018, Prof. Ning Wang was invited to give a keynote talk at the first technical workshop of ITU-T Focus Group on Network 2030. The 4K VoD delivery scheme developed in the CONCERT project was highlighted as a key use case of future network intelligence which is the key topic of the talk. The workshop was held at University of New York and there were around 70 people from both ICT industry and academia.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201810/Pages/default.aspx
 
Description Dissemination through International Telecommunication Standardization Focus Group of Network 2030 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact This is an invited talk at the ITU-T headquarter in Geneva in the context of the ITU Network 2030 Focus Group Workshop. The topic of the talk is about integrating satellite communications in future network infrastructures including 5G. In the talk the experiment results on using LEO satellite to transmit 4K/8K mobile video content in 5G environment were highlighted. The talk sheds lights on how future space networking can help in the delivery of emerging media content for end users in the near future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/2019101416/Pages/default.aspx
 
Description Featuring IEEE Communication Society News 
Form Of Engagement Activity A magazine, newsletter or online publication
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Media (as a channel to the public)
Results and Impact In September 2017, the developed MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) enabled technique for supporting QoE-assured 4K video content delivery at the Internet scale featured IEEE Communication Society News (CTN) as a piece of "interesting, timely and news-worthy" research achievement. This piece of work titled "Towards QoE-assured 4K Video-on-demand Delivery through Mobile Edge Virtualization with Adaptive Prefetching" has been published at IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. This is a joint work with the EPSRC KCN project (EP/L026120/1).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2017
URL https://www.comsoc.org/ctn/quality-experience-mobile-video-using-smart-edge
 
Description Technology Demo at Mobile World Congress (2018) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Between February 26th and March 1st, the UNIS team participated in the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) event at Barcelona and demonstrated the developed MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) based solution for QoE-assured 4K 360 video delivery at the Internet scale. During the exhibition period, the demo attracted over 200 interested audience who personally experienced the delivered quality. These include the UK DCMS Minister and chief executives from 3GPP, telecom industry and other vertical industry companies. This is a joint work with the EPSRC KCN project (EP/L026120/1).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.mobileworldcongress.com/about/