Network and Multimedia Systems Lab (NMSL)
Welcome to the Network Systems Lab (NSL) at SFU!
We are interested in the broad areas of multimedia networking and multimedia systems. We develop algorithms and systems to efficiently distribute multimedia content to large-scale user communities over wired and wireless networks. The Network Systems Lab is led by Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda. and it is located in the TASC1 building, room 8210.
We hold regular group meeting for discussion and brainstorming.
Our current research interests include mobile multimedia, immersive and 3D video streaming, and cloud support for mobile and multimedia systems. Brief description and links to currently active projects are given below.
Next Generation Video
With massive investments in the virtual reality (VR) hardware sector, companies encounter the challenge of providing VR content. The current solution of installing and operating VR camera rigs is expensive and not scalable. This project provides novel algorithms and methods to automatically convert standard broadcast 2D video streams to 3D and immersive VR streams of high quality. It also provides algorithms for adaptively streaming such complex multimedia content over the Internet to heterogeneous receivers.
Mobile Multimedia
We are designing algorithms to optimize video streaming in mobile wireless networks from different perspectives, including energy consumption of mobile receivers, quality of the videos delivered, and efficient utilization of the wireless bandwidth.
Cloud Gaming
We are working on a method to improve the quality of encoded video games in cloud gaming using the recent High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoder. The quality of the encoded videos in these methods is optimized based on the content while running in realtime.
ISP and CDN Traffic Management
We develop algorithms and systems for future ISP and CDN architectures. This includes resource management of ISP-managed CDNs (often called Telco-CDN). We develop stateless and efficient protocols and tools to support multicast traffic engineering in the ISP network.
Concluded Projects
Industrial Automation as a Cloud Service
We are developing algorithms and systems to enable offering the whole stack of industrial automation systems from the cloud.
Mobile Multimedia
Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution
We are exploring the applicability of the P2P paradigm to build cost-effective content distribution systems. Problems such as sender selection, adaptive object replication, and content caching are being studied. We are also developing models to analyze the new characteristics of the P2P traffic and the impact of these characteristics on the cache replacement policies and object replication strategies. Furthermore, we are devising analytic models to study the dynamics of the P2P system capacity and the impact of various parameters on it.
Online Networked Games
We are designing various algorithms to improve the performance of online games.
Network Security
We are exploring network monitoring techniques to detect and thwart intrusion and denial-of-service attacks in their early stages by observing unusual traffic patterns injected by such attacks. We are studying the security of multimedia streaming systems that employ multi-layer and fine-grain scalable video streams.
Wireless Sensor Networks
We are developing coverage and connectivity maintenance protocols that consider probabilistic (i.e., more realistic) sensing and communication models. We are also designing protocols that provide controllable degrees of coverage (k-coverage).
