Meeting Interactivity Requirements in Mobile E-Witness: An Experimental Study

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a session-layer load balancing mechanism and its deployment in a mobile surveillance system named Mobile E-Witness (MEW), which we have developed (Ghini et al., Multimedia Tools and Applications, 37(3), 293-318, 2008). The load balancing mechanism proposed in this paper allows MEW to effectively meet interactivity requirements and it is based on an "early retransmission" technique that exploits the overall bandwidth provided by a number of heterogeneous (broadband and metropolitan area) wireless adapters incorporated in MEW. This technique anticipates a suspected unavailability of the adapters in order to avoid the effects of network congestion and guarantee continuity of the communication service and support for multimedia services such as IP telephony. We have carried out an experimental evaluation of the MEW prototype in order to assess its effectiveness in meeting interactivity and responsiveness requirements. This paper summarizes our design and the principal results we have obtained from the evaluation mentioned above.

A Web 2.0, Location-Based Architecture for a Seamless Discovery of Points of Interests

“…The HTTP requests produced by the Web browser reach the LBC as a TCP flow; the LBC splits that flow and delivers the fragments through the MPCC, retransmitting the fragments when necessary (for more details about the load balancing mechanism, please refer to [10]). The LBS receives the fragments, reconstructs the original TCP flow and delivers it to the HTTP proxy that forwards the request to the destination.…”