An Efficient video on demand system over Cognitive

Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Mohammad Siraj
1
1
PSATRI, College of Engineering
King Saud University, Post Box 800,
Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Zeeshan Ahmad Abbasi
2
2
Department of Electronics Engineering, Mewat
Engineering College, Haryana, India
Abstract Cognitive Radio (CR) is an emerging and promising
technology which is predicted to solve the problem of spectrum
shortage by utilization of the spectrum efficiently by exploiting
the licensed spectrum white spaces. Video on demand (VoD) is a
very popular present day service. It is a well-known fact, that
video on demand internet service needs a large amount of
bandwidth. CR WMNs is envisaged to provide the much needed
bandwidth for video streaming as CR WMNs has the ability to
access a large part of the under-utilized licensed spectrum. In CR
WMNs interference is a critical issue which degrades cognitive
radio wireless mesh networks (CR WMNs) performance. As the
number of users rises, interference also increases resulting in low
throughput. In this paper first an analytical model for CR
WMNs has been presented. We have also presented an efficient
VoD model and an optimizing approach which minimizes
interference to provide a much needed higher network capacity
to VoD services. Simulation results show effectiveness of our
proposed approach as there is an increase in the number of
concurrent VoD sessions.
Keywords- CR WMNs, VoD, interference, DSA
I. INTRODUCTION
The Cognitive radio (CR) term was first coined by Mitola
in 1999[1]. A cognitive radio is defined as a radio that can
change its transmitter parameters based on interaction within
the environment in which it operates [2]. It is a promising
approach to utilize TV spectrum in an efficient and
opportunistic way [3]. It differs from conventional radio
devices that it has cognitive capability and reconfigurability [3]
[4]. If the secondary users are allowed transmissions along with
the primary users (overlay cognitive model) secondary users
should not cross the interference temperature threshold [5].
Through CR, the unused spectrum is accessed temporarily,
which is called white space or spectrum hole [4]. The video on-
demand application (VoD) is a very popular internet service
occupying 27 % of the internet traffic [6]. According to a
survey, more than 74.1% of business and personal users
access streaming media at least twice or thrice a week [7]. In
the United States, 66 percent of tablet owners stream video
twice or thrice per week or more [8].According to a forecast
from IDC, video services will generate over $1.7 USD billion
in revenues by 2010[9] [10]. This estimated figure is much
less than the present-day figures. Unfortunately, we dont have
the current figures. Internet VoD applications, such as
YouTube, PPStream and PPLive, are very popular with the
users. As they require a high amount of bandwidth, they are
very costly. Video over the internet poses some important
challenges. Sometimes the network may be down or there
could be congestion in the network leading to service loss. A
VoD system can be one configured in one of the following
types. a) Distributed b) Centralized and c) Networked. In a
distributed VoD system, the media content is stored on one
central server with smaller servers around it to cater for high-
demand requests. In a centralized system, the entire media
content is on a centralized server. This server handles all
clients requests. In a network environment, the media servers
are spread across the network. Each server handles requests
from a small group of clients only to provide an interrupted
high-quality video playback. In a VoD system, the two major
hurdles are high bandwidth and the high cost associated with it.
It has been a challenge for researchers to make VoD efficient,
reliable, robust and affordable.
CR WMNs have the capability of utilizing both unlicensed
bands and unused licensed bands as a result they have more
spectrum resources. In CR WMNs dynamic channel allocation
is easy as it has been designed for the packet level. They can
span the noncontiguous spectrum through Discontiguous
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DOFDM).
During the transmission, CR WMNs must ensure that when the
primary user (PU) or licensed user wish to transmit, CR -
WMNs should immediately let off that particular channel and
hop to an unused channel.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In section
2, the research related to this work has been presented. Section
3 describes the network model to be considered for classic
WMN, extending it to incorporate CR capabilities. In section 4,
we discuss our proposed VoD model and describe our
proposed optimizing scheduling algorithm. Section 5 presents
simulation results. Finally, section 6 concludes this paper.
II. RELATED WORK
It has been a challenging job for the researchers to provide
VoD service to the clients. Some important parameters
hindering this service are bandwidth, end to end delay and
sensitivity. Some researchers have tried to enhance its
performance by transmitting the video over multipath. A peer
2013 International Symposium on Computational and Business Intelligence
978-0-7695-5066-4/13 $26.00 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ISCBI.2013.53
231
to peer (P2P) architecture was presented in which a user could
do video streaming through peers and servers [11-13]. In [14]
authors presented a cooperative P2P scheme. This scheme
performed better in comparison to traditional non-cooperative
schemes. All the above proposed techniques utilizes wireless
networks based on static spectrum and not on Dynamic Access
Spectrum (DSA) technique. From [3] it is seen that there are
portion of the assigned spectrums which are congested so much
that there is interference while, on the other hand, large
portions of the allocated spectrum are sporadically used.
WMNs [15] are the present-day network technology providing
last mile broadband connectivity to the end users. By
incorporating CR technology in WMNs, a less congested
network with high bandwidth can be built. Siraj and Shebeilli
[16] proposed a cross layer multi-channel MAC protocol for
route discovery utilizing CR technology. It had the ability of
switching the channels opportunistically according to the
channel availability. Its performance was evaluated in terms of
an end to end delay, packet delivery ratio and throughput. A
beamforming approach was proposed [17] for enhancing
performance in CR WMNs. Siraj and Bakar [18-19]
demonstrated the impact of interference on Multi-hop Wireless
Mesh Network. They showed how the performance is degraded
due to interference. In [20] the authors demonstrated how the
WMN performance could be enhanced using CR technology
by minimizing the interference through link scheduling.
III. NETWORKMODEL
We present an arbitrarily distributed wireless mesh network
with n nodes defined by a directed graph, G= (V, E):
Where V is the set of vertices representing nodes of WMN; E
is the set of directional edges representing radio links between
the nodes.
We consider dij the distance between nodes, i and j, where
each node is equipped with radio, which has: rt transmission
range and ri interference range; with constraint ri > rt.
There exists a link {i, j} between node j and k provided.
djk ri and i j
Thus, the link between two neighbor nodes j and k of WMN is
represented by the directed edge.
{i,j`E
A node j can successfully transmit to node k if the
following two conditions are met.
a) dij rt (1)

b) dkj rik where nk is the neighbor node. (2)
Fig. 1 shows presence of six nodes in WMN. When node 2 is
transmitting and if node 4 wants to transmit it cannot transmit
due to (1) and (2). Similarly, nodes 1 and 2 cannot, whereas
node 5 and 6 can, transmit. Fig. 1 also shows that node 4 will
cause interference if it tries to connect.

Figure 1. Nodes Constraint Diagram
Based on the above approach an interference graph Gi can be
constructed. An interference graph can be represented by Gi =
(Vi,Ei).The vertex set is identical to the directed graph G
representing nodes of WMN. There exists a directed edge
from node j to node k if
a) a signal from node j is strong enough to disturb node k but
b) it cannot be decoded correctly by k
So if there are two communication links {j,k} and {l,m} and if
they are not able to transmit, it indicates that there exists an
edge between them. So an edge for the interference graph Gi
can be drawn between {j,k} and {l,m} based on the following
conditions, i.e. djm rj or dlk rl. With the help of interference
graph, Gi and vertex set Ei, an interference vector can be
defined between any given link say link {i,j} and all the links
LQ(,I^NO`^LM`DQGWKHUHLVDOLQNEHWZHHQOLQN^LM`DQG
link {k,l} then I {i,j},{k,l} = 1 otherwise it is 0. Similarly,
Inteference vector for all the links can be computed and an
interference constraint matrix |E||E| can be constructed. This
constraint is shown by the Fig. 1.
Suppose node i wants to transfer to node j on channel q of the
spectrum band p, the nodes i and j should neither transmit nor
receive data on channel q. Further node i should not be in the
vicinity of the interference range of node k on channel q and
spectrum band p. During this time not only the nodes in the
interference range should not transmit but also the hidden
nodes nearby i should also be silent.
The status of channel q of the spectrum band p can be defined
by equation 3.
( )
1
,
0
p q
ij
C

=
`
)
(3)

232
If there is a transmission from node i to node j it is 1 otherwise
0 Where Cij
(p,q)
is the status of the channel q. Therefore
( ) , p q
ij ij
C T s
(4)
Where Tij is the connectivity matrix for node i and node j.
From the equation 1and 2, it is very clear node i cannot
transfer to its one hop neighbour j on channel p of the
spectrum band q because of the presence of node k in the
vicinity of the interference range of node i (ji).This can be
written as
( ) ( ) , ,
( , )
( , ) 1
p q p q
ij k i ij
l V
C I T k l C
e
+ s
_
(5)
This equation 5 shows the Interference Constraint.
IV. THE COGNITIVE SCENARIO AND THE PROPOSED MODEL
Figure 2 below shows the block diagram of our proposed
VoD model of video streaming over a cognitive wireless mesh
network. Cognitive WMNs are self-organizing, self-healing
and self-forming. Mesh routers and mesh clients are the
elements of WMNs, as shown in Figure 2. The mesh nodes
maintain connectivity with the other nodes of the network
automatically. Mesh Routers also called gateway nodes .They
maintain connectivity with other routers and to the outside
world. We assume that each mesh router contains CR interface
for DSA for jumping to the next available channel when the
Primary Users (PU) wish to communicate. They are able to
communicate through the control interfaces after acquiring a
Common Control Channel (CCC) [21]. The VoD model is a
distributed VoD system where the media content is stored on
one central server called content server with smaller servers
(Server 1, Server 2, Server N, etc.) around it to cater for high-
demand requests. The network is reliable because of the mesh
structure through which multiple paths are feasible to each of
the mesh nodes. It is assumed that all the clients maintain a
buffer space which keeps a record of the recent viewed
popular movie (movies with high demand). As all the
incoming requests vary from one client to another, they are
independent of each other. Therefore, the incoming process of
normal requests as well as of interactive requests to the
content server can be modeled as a Poisson distribution.
Whenever a client makes a request for the movie, this request
goes to the content server who keeps a track of all the users. If
the client is a first-time user, he has to register himself in the
content server so that the list of clients watching video is
maintained. The content server will guide him to the peer
through which the client will be able to get the streaming
video. The scheme shown in Figure 2 has the following
advantages.
a) Client can download from multiple sites over multipath.
b) Traffic Load is balanced.
Raw
Video
Stream
C
l
o
u
d
Server1
Server 2
Server N
Content
Server
Vedio
Stream1
Vedio
Stream2
Vedio
StreamN
CH1
CH2
CH N

Figure 2. A conceptual diagram of real-time video streaming
over CR WMNs
The problem formulation discussed in section 3 will be solved
by a standard linear programming (SLP) considering the
constraints. In our case, this has been solved in Visual Basic.
The solution obtained by SLP will yield optimized network
flows. The network flow between the mesh nodes will be
optimized using our centralized optimized channel scheduling
approach below.
For all the links (1: L) and for all the network flows
Calculate cost for each link on each channel
Costjk = min (Cost)jk
If the links are in the interference range,
Assign Interfering links 1 and non-interfering links 0
The cost is defined by the ratio of the optimized network flow
value to the optimized time schedule value. After the
implementation of the above algorithm, we have the complete
information of interfering and non-interfering links with
minimum cost. We can schedule interfering links in the
different time slots in the same channel. Thus, both the
network flows and time scheduling will be optimized.
V. SIMULATIONSCENARIO ANDRESULTS
In this section, we discuss the simulation scenario and
results. We consider the maximum number of cognitive users
as 50 spread in a 400 X 400 area. The data rate was taken as
54 Mbps and the maximum transmission range rt is 90 m and
the maximum interference range ri is 160 m. Random topology
was selected. Number of channels was 8. 100 data sets were
generated randomly for the simulation. The time slots,
availability of frequency channels at the mesh nodes and link
pair were randomly generated. Number of gateways was
fixed to five. We have taken these simulations values so at to
233
simulate a medium-size network. We considered two
scenarios. In the first scenario effect of interference to the
primary users was not considered during application of the
proposed optimized algorithm. In the second scenario
interference to the primary users was considered during the
application of the proposed optimized algorithm. From the
figure 3, it is observed that with an increase in the number of
mesh nodes, maximum number of concurrent VoD sessions
provided was around 50. This was due to an interference
increase in CR WMNs arising from an increase in multi hops
resulting in bandwidth limitation and congestion. However,
with the application of our proposed optimized algorithm,
interference was minimized and there was an increase in the
maximum number of VoD sessions provided i.e. 70. This
shows that our proposed model and proposed algorithm
perform well and can provide more VoD sessions by
mitigating interference in CR WMNs.
Figure 3. Concurrent VoD session Vs. VoD Clients
VI. CONCLUSIONANDFUTURE WORK
In this work, an attempt has been made to use CR technology
in wireless mesh networks to provide the much desired
bandwidth for VoD application, which is an immensely very
popular service with the present era users. There is a critical
need for a larger bandwidth for it. Interference is a critical
factor hampering the performance of wireless mesh networks.
A conceptual model has been presented to provide VoD
service over CR WMNs. Also an algorithm to optimize
network flow and time scheduling for minimizing interference
in CR WMNs is proposed. Interference, scheduling and
spectrum constraints were modeled considering cross layer
approach. Simulation results indicate that by using our
proposed algorithm, VoD service could be provided to more
clients.
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