Study on technologies for traffic aggregation on the distribution network between VoDs

This work will be done by Eduardo Carvalho with the supervision of Prof. Francisco Fontes and Prof. Rui Aguiar from UA.



Motivation for the project:

Currently there are well-established transport networks, for clearly defined service requirements, mostly geographically well established. With the introduction of high-bandwidth services on the mobile network, the transport network is expected to have increased requirements, and to have increased Quality of Service challenges. Currently, Ethernet is appearing as a potential evolutionary technology, and two different techniques are now being discussed on the network: T-MPLS, PBB-TE and OTN. Optical based technologies are also a current trend.

This project aims to:
a) perform a comparison of the current and future alternatives for this core networks.
b) Define a methodology for selection of these alternatives, given aspects as coverage, customer usage, quality of service assurances, and evolution and deployment cost.
c) Develop a simulation/evaluation tool to apply this methodology
d) Apply this methodology to the Portuguese scenario

Optmization tool for VoD server placement

Optmization tool for VoD server placement will be one of the topics for the MSIN Summer Projects. This work will be done by Gonçalo Pereira with the supervision of Prof. Amaro de Sousa from UA.

Motivation for the project:

A video-on-demand system is composed by multiple video servers and a Head-End system, where the client connects for identification. Whenever a movie is selected for provision, the front-end system redirects the request to one of the video servers where it is available. Each available movie is at one or more video servers, which has a maximum number of stored movies (limited by its storage capacity) and a maximum number of movies that can be provisioned (limited by the bandwidth of its connection to the network).

For an optimal video provision, all video servers would have a copy of each movie. However, this would lead to extreme storage capacity servers. For an optimal video server storage, all movies would exist in a single server. However, this would lead to poor video provision performance (many video requests not been satisfied). Much more interesting is if the front-end can relate the request client position on the network with the server position on the network. If the server which gives the shortest routing path to the client is selected, the overall performance of the system will be optimized with respect to the network resource utilization. A further problem is related with the problems associated with ICC servers, and their location/operation in the whole architecture.

This work aims:
a) to develop a tool to plan and define the optimal location and size of some of the VoD servers
b) Considering also the location of the ICC servers, taking in consideration the existing ICC usage patterns.
c) Define the movie assignment and distribution algorithms deployed in the network, under which the tool will define the location of the above boxes.