A personalized system for scalable distribution of multimedia content in multicast wireless networks
June 15, 2014·
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0 min read
Ismael de Fez
Miriam Gil
Joan Fons
Juan Carlos Guerri
Vicente Pelechano

Abstract
This paper presents a novel architecture for scalable multimedia content delivery over wireless networks. The architecture takes into account both the user preferences and context in order to provide personalized contents to each user. In this way, third-party applications filter the most appropriate contents for each client in each situation. One of the key characteristics of the proposal is the scalability, which is provided, apart from the use of filtering techniques, through the transmission in multicast networks. In this sense, content delivery is carried out by means of the FLUTE (File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) protocol, which provides reliability in unidirectional environments through different mechanisms such as AL-FEC (Application Layer – Forward Error Correction) codes, used in this paper. Another key characteristic is the context-awareness and personalization of content delivery, which is provided by means of context information, user profiles, and adaptation. The system proposed is validated through several empirical studies. Specifically, the paper presents evaluations of two types that collect objective and subjective measures. The first evaluate the efficiency of the transmission protocol, analyzing how the use of appropriate transmission parameters reduces the download time (and thus increasing the Quality of Experience), which can be minimized by using caching techniques. On the other hand, the subjective measures present a study about the user experience after testing the application and analyze the accuracy of the filtering process/strategy. Results show that using AL-FEC mechanisms produces download times until four times lower than when no protection is used. Also, results prove that there is a code rate that minimizes the download time depending on the losses and that, in general, code rates 0.7 and 0.9 provide good download times for a wide range of losses. On the other hand, subjective measures indicate a high user satisfaction (more than 80%) and a relevant degree of accuracy of the content adaption.
Type
Publication
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 74(21), 9595–9621. Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Authors
Associate Researcher · Master’s Director at VIU
Ismael de Fez was born in Valencia, Spain in 1983. He received his Telecommunications Engineering degree in 2007 and his M.S. in Telematics in 2010 from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), where his M.Sc. thesis was awarded by the Telefónica chair of UPV. He obtained his PhD in Telecommunications from UPV in 2014 and an MBA from UPV in 2017. He worked as an R&D Engineer at the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM, UPV) from 2008 to 2021. Since 2021 he has been Director of the Master’s in Development of Web Applications and Services at the Valencian International University (VIU). His research interests include multimedia transmission, DASH adaptive streaming, QoE modelling, AL-FEC coding for unidirectional wireless environments, and file encoding.

Authors
Full Professor · Head of the group
Juan Carlos Guerri Cebollada was born in Valencia, Spain in 1969. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in 1993 and 1997, respectively. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Communications Engineering at UPV, where he teaches at the ETSI Telecomunicación. He leads the Multimedia Communications research group (COMM) of the iTEAM (Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications). His research spans multimedia communications, adaptive video streaming (DASH), quality of experience, wireless and ad hoc networks, and the application of multimedia technologies to industry, medicine, education and communications.