In her research plan, the principal investigator (PI) proposes to carry out integrated research on multimedia coding, content delivery, and security for media streaming on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.
Media streaming on IP networks has been constrained by limited bandwidth, large and variant end-to-end delay, and poor playback quality. The advent of P2P networks brought new opportunities (e.g., more bandwidth from participating peers and lower delay because of path diversity) and new challenges (e.g., security risk) for media streaming. This project aims to realize the full potential of P2P networks in media streaming by exploiting the interaction of multimedia coding, the structure of coded bit stream, overlay network architecture, and transmission strategies.
Security issues associated with P2P networks imply that we need to provide security services (e.g., cryptography and authentication) for media streaming on such networks. However, security and QoS sometimes raise conflicting requirements. In this project, the PI will thoroughly study their relationship and tradeoff, and investigate how to leverage P2P network architecture to ease the tension between security and QoS requirements.
In her education plan, the PI endeavors to broaden the scope and improve the quality of education by integrating the latest research developments into instructional activities. The plan consists of three components: 1) exploiting ties with local industry and research labs to keep students up-to-date with new technologies and innovations; 2) enhancing both undergraduate and graduate courses in networking through curriculum development; and 3) involving students from underrepresented groups in research projects.
Intellectual Merit. The PIs research plan will lead to media streaming applications with improved QoS and better protection from malicious attacks. While previous work inspected individual aspects on P2P media streaming architecture, media delivery, and content protection, the proposed research tasks in this project study QoS and security issues in an integrated fashion, exploiting new developments in the networking, signal processing, and security communities. The PI believes that this integrated approach is more likely to advance the state-of-the-art technology in QoS and security for general multimedia networking applications.
Broader Impacts. The proposed career development plan will broadly impact the university, industry and research community in a number of ways. 1) It creates and fosters a synergistic relationship with local industry in Silicon Valley; 2) It enhances both undergraduate and graduate curriculum in the Computer Engineering Department, San Jose State University, a non-Ph.D. granting institution; 3) It reaches out to undergraduate, minority, and women students to involve them in challenging research projects; 4) It helps the research and educational community by making project results publicly available. The research results will be published in articles, while related software and course materials will be made available on the web.
In the project, the PI and her team carried out research in the intersections of media coding, content delivery, quality-of-service optimizations, and information security areas, leading to the development of advanced algorithms to optimize resource allocations and balance the often conflicting requirements between quality and security. In the project, the project team developed algorithms in both the application and transport layers to improve the distribution performance of large multimedia objects to users with different bandwidth resources, different display resolutions, and different expectations of application quality. The algorithms include a number of optimal distribution algorithms in the application space and a new congestion control algorithm in the Transport Layer Protocol – TCP. To understand the implications of security requirements on multimedia applications, the project team carried out a comprehensive security analysis of a range of attacks toward peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and protocols. Our investigation includes a careful measurement study of a commercially deployed P2P streaming system, PPStream. The study has unveiled a number of limitations in PPStream, regarding to peer privacy, bandwidth efficiency, and system availability. The findings complement related measurement studies on other P2P streaming systems and provide guidelines in the design of a secure and coding-aware P2P streaming system. In the later phase of the project, the project team carried out research investigations into emerging areas and explored how to apply the algorithms developed in P2P streaming systems to address problems in cloud computing and storage virtualization. We proposed to build an intelligent agent to interact with an overlay of cloud storage providers and designed optimal storage deployment strategies to recover from service breakdowns of these providers. Owing to the needs of running large-scale network experiments in the project, the PI had initiated an effort to bring her university into the PlanetLab consortium and has served as its site PI since the beginning of the membership. Later she also incorporated experiments running on other advanced testbeds, including Emulab and DETER, into her courses on networking and security. In the project period, the PI has recruited many undergraduate students, master students, and one post-doctoral researcher to join the project. Through the research activities, some undergraduate students became very interested in research career and have continued on to pursue PhD degrees in research universities. The students learnt how to do research by example from the PI and from fellow teammates. For them, research is no longer a daunting task, but an enjoyable learning experience. For outreach and broad dissemination, the PI had been a frequent invited speaker in NSF funded TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology) workshops, including its annual Symposium on Curriculum Development in Security and Information Assurance, NSF WISE (Women in Science & Engineering) workshop, and SeCuR-IT program - Summer Experience, Colloquium and Research in Information Technology.
