BlockchainITEC is delighted to announce the next speaker in our guest lecture series – Dr. Antorweep Chakravorty from University of Stavanger and bitYoga, Norway. The course will take place from November 18 – 29, 2019

This course presents an introduction and further information about the high-interest topic blockchains. Please register at the course 623.714.

Further information is available HERE.

The Klagenfurt University hosted the first ASPIDE technical meeting (30th September – 2nd October), which aims on designing scalable software solutions for exascale computing.

2019 ASPIDE Meeting Klagenfurt

ASPIDE Meeting at Klagenfurt University

2019 ASPIDE Meeting Klagenfurt Social Event

2019 ASPIDE Meeting Klagenfurt (Social Event)

Philipp Moll

Philipp Moll presented the paper “Inter-Server Game State Synchronization using Named Data Networking” on the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2019 in Macau, China.

Authors: Philipp Moll, Sebastian Theuermann, Natascha Rauscher, Hermann Hellwagner (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Jeff Burke (UCLA)

Abstract: In this paper, we develop a system for inter-server game state synchronization using the NDN architecture. We use Minecraft as a real-world example of online games and extend Minecraft’s single-server architecture to work as multi-server game. In our prototype,we use two different NDN-based approaches for the dissemination of game state updates in server clusters. In a naive approach, servers request game state updates for small segments of the game worldfrom other servers of the cluster. In an improved approach – the region manifest approach– servers identify changed parts of the world by subscribing to manifest files containing information about world regions managed by the other servers of the cluster. An apparent downside of the NDN approaches is the high overhead when handling small-sized game state updates, but our evaluation shows that NDN already improves on IP-based implementations regarding the resulting traffic volume when three or more servers are involved. Furthermore, caused by NDN’s inherent multicast functionality, the advantage over IP increases with the size of theserver cluster. Moreover, the use of NDN-based approaches leads to benefits beyond traffic reduction only. The name-based host-independent access to world regions allows to scale server clusters easier.

The paper full paper can be found on: https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn19-25.pdf

Christian Timmerer

The ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys) is held June 8-11, 2020 in Istanbul, Turkey and provides a forum for researchers to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. While research about specific aspects of multimedia systems are regularly published in the various proceedings and transactions of the networking, operating systems, real-time systems, databases, mobile computing, distributed systems, computer vision, and middleware communities, MMSys aims to cut across these domains in the context of multimedia data types. This provides a unique opportunity to investigate the intersections and the interplay of the various approaches and solutions developed across these domains to deal with multimedia data types.

General Chairs
— Ali C. Begen (Ozyegin University and Networked Media, Turkey)
— Laura Toni (University College London, UK)

TPC Chairs
— Özgü Alay (Simula Metropolitan and University of Oslo, Norway)
— Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt and Bitmovin, Austria)

Link: ACM MMSYS 2020

Abstract: Video streaming is one of the top traffic contributors in the Internet and a frequent research subject. It is expected that streaming traffic will grow 4-fold for video globally and 9-fold for mobile video between 2017 and 2022. In this paper, we present an automatized measurement framework for evaluating video streaming QoE in operational broadband networks, using headless streaming with a Docker-based client, and a server-side implementation allowing for the use of multiple video players and adaptation algorithms. Our framework allows for integration with the MONROE testbed and Bitmovin Analytics, which bring on the possibility to conduct large-scale measurements in different networks, including mobility scenarios, and monitor different parameters in the application, transport, network, and physical layers in real-time.

Authors: Cise Midoglu (Simula), Anatoliy Zabrovskiy (AAU), Özgü Alay (Simula), Daniel Hölbling-Inzko (Bitmovin), Carsten Griwodz (Univ. of Oslo), Christian Timmerer (AAU/Bitmovin)

Keywords: adaptive streaming, network measurements, OTT video analytics, QoE

Link: ACMMM 2019

Christian Timmerer

Abstract: The increasing popularity of head-mounted devices and 360° video cameras allows content providers to offer virtual reality video streaming over the Internet, using a relevant representation of the immersive content combined with traditional streaming techniques. While this approach allows the user to freely move her head, her location is fixed by the camera’s position within the scene. Recently, an increased interest has been shown for free movement within immersive scenes, referred to as six degrees of freedom. One way to realize this is by capturing objects through a number of cameras positioned in different angles, and creating a point cloud which consists of the location and RGB color of a significant number of points in the three-dimensional space. Although the concept of point clouds has been around for over two decades, it recently received increased attention by ISO/IEC MPEG, issuing a call for proposals for point cloud compression. As a result, dynamic point cloud objects can now be compressed to bit rates in the order of 3 to 55 Mb/s, allowing feasible delivery over today’s mobile networks. In this paper, we propose PCC-DASH, a standards-compliant means for HTTP adaptive streaming of scenes comprising multiple, dynamic point cloud objects. We present a number of rate adaptation heuristics which use information on the user’s position and focus, the available bandwidth, and the client’s buffer status to decide upon the most appropriate quality representation of each object. Through an extensive evaluation, we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each solution. We argue that the optimal solution depends on the considered scene and camera path, which opens interesting possibilities for future work.

Authors: Jeroen van der Hooft, Tim Wauters, Filip De Turck (Ghent University – imec), Christian Timmerer, and Hermann Hellwagner (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)

Keywords: HTTP adaptive streaming, MPEG-DASH, immersive video, point clouds, MPEG V-PCC, rate adaptation

Link: ACMMM 2019

Trust, privacy, control and what else ! Lets hear to ARTICONF consortium as what transpires them to build Next Generation Social Media Ecosystem with novel set of trustworthy, resilient, globally sustainable and decentralized data-driven services.

Philipp Moll

The paper “Inter-Server Game State Synchronization using Named Data Networking” has been accepted for publication at the ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking 2019 to be held in Macau, China (24-26 September 2019).

Authors: Philipp Moll, Sebastian Theuermann, Natascha Rauscher, Hermann Hellwagner (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Jeff Burke (UCLA)

Abstract: In this paper, we develop a system for inter-server game state synchronization using the NDN architecture. We use Minecraft as a real-world example of online games and extend Minecraft’s single-server architecture to work as multi-server game. In our prototype, we use two different NDN-based approaches for the dissemination of game state updates in server clusters. In a naive approach, servers request game state updates for small segments of the game world from other servers of the cluster. In an improved approach – the region manifest approach – servers identify changed parts of the world by subscribing to manifest files containing information about world regions managed by the other servers of the cluster. An apparent downside of the NDN approaches is the high overhead when handling small-sized game state updates, but our evaluation shows that NDN already improves on IP-based implementations regarding the resulting traffic volume when three or more servers are involved. Furthermore, caused by NDN’s inherent multicast functionality, the advantage over IP increases with the size of the server cluster. Moreover, the use of NDN-based approaches leads to benefits beyond traffic reduction only. The name-based host-independent access to world regions allows to scale server clusters easier.