This paper performs application-level QoS and user-level QoS assessment of audio-video streaming in cross-layer designed wireless ad hoc networks. In order to achieve high QoS at the user-level, we employ link quality-based routing in the network layer and media synchronization control in the application layer. We adopt three link quality-based routing protocols: OLSR-SS (Signal Strength), AODV-SS, and LQHR (Link Quality-Based Hybrid Routing). OLSR-SS is a proactive routing protocol, while AODV-SS is a reactive one. LQHR is a hybrid protocol, which is a combination of proactive and reactive routing protocols. For application-level QoS assessment, we performed computer simulation with ns-2 where an IEEE 802.11b mesh topology network with 24 nodes was assumed. We also assessed user-level QoS by a subjective experiment with 30 assessors. From the assessment results, we find AODV-SS the best for networks with long inter-node distances, while LQHR outperforms AODV-SS for short inter-node distances. In addition, we also examine characteristics of the three schemes with respect to the application-level QoS in random topology networks.

Based on an estimation model of video subjective quality, a bandwidth reallocation strategy for video communications on NGN is presented. Experimental results show that the average PSNR of recovery video quality can be greatly increased by using the proposed method when the network bandwidth decreases.

In this letter, we propose a new H2 smoother (H2S) with a finite impulse response (FIR) structure for discrete-time state-space signal models. This smoother is called an H2 FIR smoother (H2FS). Constraints such as linearity, quasi-deadbeat property, FIR structure, and independence of the initial state information are required in advance to design H2FS that is optimal in the sense of H2 performance criterion. It is shown that H2FS design problem can be converted into the convex programming problem written in terms of a linear matrix inequality (LMI) with a linear equality constraint. Simulation study illustrates that the proposed H2FS is more robust against uncertainties and faster in convergence than the conventional H2S.

IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access (BWA) technology is suitable for providing multimedia applications without accessing the wired networks directly. Although IEEE 802.16 standard well defines the quality of service (QoS) framework, it makes no specific recommendation with regard to the bandwidth allocation. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for allocating bandwidth in response to dynamic changes in the arrival rate such that the total bandwidth is efficiently utilized.

For wideband MIMO-OFDM systems, scheduling and link adaptation are key techniques to improve the throughput performance. However, in systems without reciprocity between the uplink and the downlink channels, these techniques require a high feedback overhead of the channel quality indication (CQI) information. In this paper, we propose a novel CQI feedback reduction method, which is based on the conventional compression techniques exploiting the discrete cosine transformation (DCT). The basic idea is to adaptively permute the CQI sequences of different MIMO streams according to one of the possible patterns before the DCT compression so that the amount of feedback bits is minimized. The possible patterns used are carefully designed according to our analysis of the two types of correlations (the inter-stream correlation and the inter-subband correlation) that exist in MIMO-OFDM transmission, as well as their impact on the compression efficiency. Simulation results verify that the proposed method can effectively reduce the CQI feedback overhead under varying channel conditions.

In this paper, the impact of display on quality assessment is addressed. Subjective quality assessment experiments have been performed on both LCD and CRT displays. Two sets of still images and two sets of moving pictures have been assessed using either an ACR or a SAMVIQ protocol. Altogether, eight experiments have been led. Results are presented and discussed, some differences are pointed out. Concerning moving pictures, these differences seem to be mainly due to LCD moving artefacts such as motion blur. LCD motion blur has been measured objectively and with psycho-physics experiments. A motion-blur metric based on the temporal characteristics of LCD can be defined. A prediction model have been then designed which predict the differences of perceived quality between CRT and LCD. This motion-blur-based model enables the estimation of perceived quality on LCD with respect to the perceived quality on CRT. Technical solutions to LCD motion blur can thus be evaluated on natural contents by this mean.

This paper proposes a new color halftone image quality assessment method based upon the color structural similarity measure with considering the human visual characteristics. To include the color visual characteristics, we carry out the color filtering for each luminance, red-green, and blue-yellow channels. Then, we apply the color structural similarity measure to the color filtered images, which are the reference image and the halftoned image, to evaluate the localized structural difference. By considering those characteristics, in this paper, the assessment of the color halftone images can be realized. We apply the proposed measure to the various kinds of color halftone images and confirm that the proposed measure can give reasonable results compared with the results by subjective evaluation.

We investigate the problem of joint transmitter and receiver power allocation with the minimax mean square error (MSE) criterion for uplink transmissions in a multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) system. The objective of power allocation is to minimize the maximum MSE among all users each of which has limited transmit power. This problem is a nonlinear optimization problem. Using the Lagrange multiplier method, we derive the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions which are necessary for a power allocation to be optimal. Numerical results indicate that, compared to the minimum total MSE criterion, the minimax MSE criterion yields a higher total MSE but provides a fairer treatment across the users. The advantages of the minimax MSE criterion are more evident when we consider the bit error rate (BER) estimates. Numerical results show that the minimax MSE criterion yields a lower maximum BER and a lower average BER. We also observe that, with the minimax MSE criterion, some users do not transmit at full power. For comparison, with the minimum total MSE criterion, all users transmit at full power. In addition, we investigate robust joint transmitter and receiver power allocation where the channel state information (CSI) is not perfect. The CSI error is assumed to be unknown but bounded by a deterministic value. This problem is formulated as a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem with bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) constraints. Numerical results show that, with imperfect CSI, the minimax MSE criterion also outperforms the minimum total MSE criterion in terms of the maximum and average BERs.

In this paper, we present a new three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment (3DVE) system named "QuViE/P", which can enhance quality of service (QoS), that users actually feel, as good as possible when resources of computers and networks are limited. To realize this, we focus on characteristics of user's perceptual quality evaluation on 3D objects. We propose an effective QoS control scheme for QuViE/P by introducing relationships between system's internal quality parameters and user's perceptual quality parameters. This scheme can appropriately maintain the QoS of the 3DVE system and it is expected to improve convenience when using 3DVE system where resources are insufficient. We designed and implemented a prototype of QuViE/P using a multiagent framework. The experiment results show that even when the computer resource is reduced to 20% of the required amount, the proposed scheme can maintain the quality of important objects to a certain level.

This paper discusses the design of configurations of videophone equipment aimed at online sign interpretation. We classified interpretation services into three types of situations: on-site interpretation, partial online interpretation, and full online interpretation. For each situation, the spatial configurations of the equipment are considered keeping the issue of nonverbal signals in mind. Simulation experiments of sign interpretation were performed using these spatial configurations and the qualities of the configurations were assessed. The preferred configurations had the common characteristics that the hearing subject could see the face of his/her principal conversation partner, that is, the deaf subject. The results imply that hearing people who do not understand sign language utilize nonverbal signals for facilitating interpreter-mediated conversation.

Digital video encapsulates the time series of a frame (still) images, where overall video quality can be obtained by using the quality of each frame image and the temporal information between the frame image. Coding of video produces degradation of these two types of information. These degradations can be classified as spatial degradation (static degradation) of a frame images and temporal degradation between frame image (dynamic degradation). In the framework of video quality evaluation it is necessary to consider those degradations, because their contents are strongly interdependable and quantification is problematic for these degradations. Therefore, the development of an objective video quality assessment method for single video quality requires to investigate how much static degradation and dynamic degradation affect single video quality. In this research, single video quality was predicted highly accuratly by using frame quality as static degradation and frame rate information as dynamic degradation.

We propose a token-bucket based rate control algorithm that satisfies both maximum and minimum rate constraints with computational complexity of O(1). The proposed algorithm allocates the remaining bandwidth in a strict priority queuing manner to the flows with different priorities and in a weighted fair queuing manner to the flows within the same priority.

Image quality assessment method is a methodology that measures the difference of quality between the reference image and its distorted one. In this paper, we propose a novel reduced-reference (RR) quality assessment method for JPEG-2000 compressed images, which exploits the statistical characteristics of context information extracted through partial entropy decoding or decoding. These statistical features obtained in the process of JPEG-2000 encoding are transmitted to the receiver as side information and used to estimate the quality of images transmitted over various noisy channels at the decompression side. In the framework of JPEG-2000, the context of a current coefficient is determined depending on the pattern of the significance and/or the sign of its neighbors in three bit-plane coding passes and four coding modes. As the context information represents the local property of images, it can efficiently describe textured pattern and edge orientation. The quality of transmitted images is measured by the difference of entropy of context information between received and original images. Moreover, the proposed quality assessment method can directly process the images in the JPEG-2000 compressed domain without full decompression. Therefore, our proposed can accelerate the work of assessing image quality. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our method achieves fairly good performance in terms of the quality measurement accuracy as well as the computational complexity.

This paper considers the problem of contention resolution algorithm for multi-class with quality of service (QoS) constrained for wireless communication. Five different channel reservation schemes are proposed, namely, UNI+MLA, UNI+DS, UNI+DS+MLA, Partial UNI and Partial UNI+MLA schemes for multimedia traffic, all are extensions of our recently proposed UNI scheme for single-class traffic. The goal is to achieve the highest system performance and enable each traffic type to meet its QoS requirements. We evaluate the performance of each scheme by mathematical analysis. The numerical results show that our proposed schemes are effective in enabling each traffic type to achieve the best successful rate possible in this kind of environment. Finally when comparing between our proposed schemes and conventional technique in terms of both throughput performance and QoS requirements it is found that the UNI+MLA, UNI+DS+MLA and Partial UNI+MLA schemes are relatively efficient and suitable for practical applications.

Quantifying user satisfaction is essential, because the results can help service providers deliver better services. In this work, we propose a generalizable methodology, based on survival analysis, to quantify user satisfaction in terms of session times, i.e., the length of time users stay with an application. Unlike subjective human surveys, our methodology is based solely on passive measurement, which is more cost-efficient and better able to capture subconscious reactions. Furthermore, by using session times, rather than a specific performance indicator, such as the level of distortion of voice signals, the effects of other factors like loudness and sidetone, can also be captured by the developed models. Like survival analysis, our methodology is characterized by low complexity and a simple model-developing process. The feasibility of our methodology is demonstrated through case studies of ShenZhou Online, a commercial MMORPG in Taiwan, and the most prevalent VoIP application in the world, namely Skype. Through the model development process, we can also identify the most significant performance factors and their impacts on user satisfaction and discuss how they can be exploited to improve user experience and optimize resource allocation.

In this study, the microwave dielectric properties of the Mg4Ta2O9 and Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics with composition ratio and sintering temperature were investigated and the dielectric resonators with these ceramics were simulated. TiO2 was doped in the Mg4Ta2O9 ceramics for improvement of temperature property. The (1-x)Mg4Ta2O9-xTiO2 and Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics were prepared by solid-state reaction method. According to the X-ray diffraction data, the (1-x)Mg4Ta2O9-xTiO2 ceramics had main phase of the Mg4Ta2O9 and MgTi2O5 peaks were appeared by additions of TiO2. In the Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics, the Mg4Ta2O9 and MgTa2O6 phase were coexisted and Mg5Ta4O15 phase was appeared with increments of sintering temperature. Microwave dielectric properties of (1-x)Mg4Ta2O9-xTiO2 ceramics were affected by MgTi2O5 and TiO2 phase. The quality factor had a little decrement compared to pure Mg4Ta2O9, but there was excellent improvement in TCRF by addition of TiO2. Densifications of the Mg4Ta2O9 and MgTa2O6 and existence of the Mg5Ta4O15 phase had influence on the microwave dielectric properties of the Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics. Dielectric constant, quality factor and TCRF of the (1-x)Mg4Ta2O9-xTiO2 and Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics sintered at 1450 were 11.5622.5, 24980186410 GHz, -36.02+19.72 ppm/ and 8.2, 89473 GHz, -10.91 ppm/, respectively. ADS was used for simulation of DR. The simulated DR with the 0.5Mg4Ta2O9-0.5TiO2 and Mg5Ta4O15 ceramics had the S21 of -35.034 dB at 11.97 GHz and -28.493 dB at 10.50 GHz, respectively.

This paper presents a new QoS model for end-to-end service provisioning in multi-hop wireless networks. In legacy IEEE 802.11e based multi-hop wireless networks, the fixed assignment of service classes according to flow's priority at every node causes priority inversion problem when performing end-to-end service differentiation. Thus, this paper proposes a new QoS provisioning model called Dynamic Hop Service Differentiation (DHSD) to alleviate the problem and support effective service differentiation between end-to-end nodes. Many previous works for QoS model through the 802.11e based service differentiation focus on packet scheduling on several service queues with different service rate and service priority. Our model, however, concentrates on a dynamic class selection scheme, called Per Hop Class Assignment (PHCA), in the node's MAC layer, which selects a proper service class for each packet, in accordance with queue states and service requirement, in every node along the end-to-end route of the packet. The proposed QoS solution is evaluated using the OPNET simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms both best-effort and 802.11e based strict priority service models in mobile ad hoc environments.

We present a method for the objective quality evaluation of noise-reduced speech in wideband speech communication services, which utilize speech with a wider bandwidth (e.g., 7 kHz) than the usual telephone bandwidth. Experiments indicate that the amount of residual noise and the distortion of speech and noise, which are quality factors, influence the perceived quality degradation of noise-reduced speech. From the results, we observe the principal relationships between these quality factors and perceived speech quality. On the basis of these relationships, we propose a method that quantifies each quality factor in noise-reduced speech by analyzing signals that can be measured and assesses the overall perceived quality of noise-reduced speech using values of these quality factors. To verify the validity of the method, we perform a subjective listening test and compare subjective quality of noise-reduced speech with its estimation. In the test, we use various types of background noise and noise-reduction algorithms. The verification results indicate that the correlation between subjective quality and its objective estimation is sufficiently high regardless of the type of background noise and noise-reduction algorithm.

In heterogeneous network environments, it is mandatory to measure the grade of the video quality in order to guarantee the optimal quality of the video streaming service. Quality of Service (QoS) has become a key issue for service acceptability and user satisfaction. Although there have been many recent works regarding video quality, most of them have been limited to measuring quality within temporal and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) scalability. H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding (SVC) has emerged and has been developed to support full scalability. This includes spatial, temporal, and SNR scalability, each of which shows different visual effects. The aim of this paper is to define and develop a novel video quality metric allowing full scalability. It focuses on the effect of frame rate, SNR, the change of spatial resolution, and motion characteristics using subjective quality assessment. Experimental results show the proposed quality metric has a high correlation to subjective quality and that it is useful in determining the video quality of SVC.

We analyze the MAC performance of the IEEE 802.11 DCF and 802.11e EDCA in non-saturation condition where device does not have packets to transmit sometimes. We assume that a flow is not generated while the previous flow is in service and the number of packets in a flow is geometrically distributed. In this paper, we take into account the feature of non-saturation condition in standards: possibility of transmission performed without preceding backoff procedure for the first packet arriving at the idle station. Our approach is to model a stochastic behavior of one station as a discrete time Markov chain. We obtain four performance measures: normalized channel throughput, average packet HoL (head of line) delay, expected time to complete transmission of a flow and packet loss probability. Our results can be used for admission control to find the optimal number of stations with some constraints on these measures.