From Theory to Practice in Wireless Multimedia Delivery

The sharing and distribution of multimedia content over the Internet has taken a momentous turn, keeping pace with the increasing market for wireless handhelds. Recent predictions (Cisco VNI) indicate that mobile video traffic will comprise more than 70% of all mobile data traffic by 2016. Towards this end, many ISPs and content providers are taking several measures, including usage-based tiered pricing, throttling bandwidth for top data users, and off-loading cellular traffic on to Wi-Fi networks. However, multimedia processing as well as its generation present a set of degrees of freedom that could be leveraged in bridging this widening gap between content providers and pipe providers.

In this talk, I will describe two of my recent work that address the problem of efficiently delivering multimedia content over cellular networks. In particular, the first part of the talk focuses on content-aware networking, that is, how one could exploit the structure of the video content to design adaptive content-aware protocols that are distortion-fair rather than just bandwidth-fair. The second part of the talk focuses on the related issue of generating network-aware content by leveraging video compressibility, consumer usage patterns, and monthly quota. On both these topics, I will present some implementation details on software defined radios, Android devices, as well as real-world trial results obtained from Princeton community volunteers.