US-Egypt Cooperative Research: A New Quality of Service Video Conferencing Model Across the Internet

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

0211036 Elzarki Description: This award is for support of a joint research project by Dr. Magda El Zarki, Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California and Dr. Hussein Eissa, Computer and Systems Department at the Electronics Research Institute (ERI), Cairo, Egypt. The project addresses videoconferencing over the Internet. The two investigators plan to develop a particular model for a differentiated services (diffserv) architecture and to evaluate this model through simulation. They will explore the implementation of the diffserv architecture in the OPNET simulator, and study the performance of the architecture with both real-time and non-real-time traffic. They plan to analyze the video/audio characteristics by using videoconferencing applications & capturing the generated packets to draw the packet PDF curves (packet size and packet interarrival time). The new proposed model is to guarantee the required quality by using some of the Diffserv simple blocks at edge devices. It also uses the IP Multicast mechanism where possible, to save more network resources. The new model is to rely on shaping the out-of-profile streams, dropping packets in case of real-time marked packets, and re-marking packets in case of non real-time marked packets. By implementing these simple blocks in the edge devices, the overload on the core routers will be minimized. Scope: This project will provide better understanding of video/audio streams over the Internet. and should advance the state of art in multimedia networking. The project will lead to a strong collaboration between the U.S. and Egyptian institutions. The collaboration between the two PIs is likely to be productive since they have had prior interaction, while Dr. Eissa was carrying out his doctorate research in the year 2000 in the United States. The visits by the staff from UC at Irvine and the ERI will be beneficial to the two institutions, and will help graduate students in Egypt, especially with the experimental and simulation component tasks.