Ant-Inspired Mini-Community-Based Solution for Video-On-Demand Services in Wireless Mobile Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on broadcasting Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 322 - 335
• Main Authors: Changqiao Xu, Shijie Jia, Lujie Zhong, Hongke Zhang, Muntean, Gabriel-Miro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.06.2014; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Ant colony optimization; Applied sciences; Architecture; Broadcasting. Videocommunications. Audiovisual; Communities; Community; Equipments and installations; Exact sciences and technology; interactivity; Maintenance costs; Maintenance engineering; Mobile communication; mobile peer-to-peer; Mobile radiocommunication systems; Networks; Nickel; Optimization; Peer-to-peer computing; Radiocommunications; Searching; Servers; Streaming media; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Teleprocessing networks. Isdn; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); Valuation and optimization of characteristics. Simulation; Video on demand; Videocommunications (networks and services); Virtual community; video-on-demand; interactivity; ant colony optimization; Virtual community; mobile peer-to-peer; Performance evaluation; Mobile radiocommunication; Streaming; ACO optimization; State of the art; Peer to peer; Video on demand; Scalability; Wireless telecommunication; Shortest path; Resource sharing; Algorithm; Information transmission; Interactive system; Computer network; Simulation; Wireless network; On demand service; Metric
• ISSN: 0018-9316; 1557-9611
• DOI: 10.1109/TBC.2014.2314791

Highly efficient distribution and management of media resources and fast content discovery are key determinants for mobile peer-to-peer video-on-demand solutions, especially in wireless mobile networks. Virtual communities making use of users' common characteristics such as interest and interaction to describe the boundary of sharing content and objects are a promising avenue for high-efficiency resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a novel ant-inspired mini-community-based video sharing solution for on-demand streaming services in wireless mobile networks (AMCV). AMCV relies on a newly designed two layer architecture and on an algorithm inspired from the indirect communication between ants via pheromone trails which enables them to discover and use shortest paths. The architecture is composed of a mini-community network layer and a community member layer. The ant-inspired algorithm enables finding the common interest of users in video content within large amounts of pseudo disorderly interactive behavior data. AMCV proposes an ant colony optimization-based community communication strategy that dynamically bridges communities to support fast search for resources. AMCV achieves high scalability by making use of a designed community maintenance mechanism to uniformly distribute the maintenance cost of members and resources in the community, according to various member roles. Simulation-based testing shows how AMCV outperforms another state-of- the-art solution in terms of a wide set of performance metrics.