Delay Measurement and Analysis of Time-critical Multimedia Applications over the Internet

Motivation: The worldwide fever for interactive multimedia applications is soaring due to great proliferation of the Internet and abundance of broadband. Most of these applications (e.g. video telephony, networked multiplayer game) are highly delay-sensitive, therefore depend on the support from the networks. A key requirement is packets that are out of delay boundary are obsolete for the application. However the best-effort nature of the Internet poses many challenges for latency and jitter solicited by real-time flows. In pursuit of end-to-end delay control mechanisms, the delay of real-time traffic for the target applications has to be investigated thoroughly in order to provide the basis for algorithm development.

Tasks: This is a hands-on study project in which the student will measure and analyze the end-to-end delay composition of real-time traffic across the global Internet. The student will start with the study of the factors that contribute to the total delay budget (e.g. end-host processing delay, single-hop delay at network nodes, etc.), and the role that delay plays in the provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS) for time-critical interactive multimedia applications like real-time audio/video content distribution (e.g. video telephony) and networked multi-player game. Intensive reading is followed to get a good understanding of the related work. With the help of off-the-shelf tools, and using self-developed test application, the student will carry out tests and measurements of one-way, round-trip as well as single-hop delays for the target applications, and for the defined test scenarios and test cases. Base on this, the analysis will be performed for delay compositions and the proportion of the obsolete packets that are out-of delay boundaries. The result of the work is supposed to be written down as a technical report and an internal presentation is required at the end of the project.

Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of computer networks, statistics, and programming skills in C++.

Supervisors: Xiaoyuan Gu(IBR)

Duration: 3 Months

• Project Report: Delay Measurement and Analysis of Time-critical Multimedia Applications