Ahmad AlhilalHong Kong University of Science and Technology | UST · Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas
Ahmad Alhilal
PhD of Computer Science
Scalable Visual Computing, Adaptive Video Streaming, Cloud-rendered XR/Mobile Cloud Gaming, Distributed Computing
About
35
Publications
26,021
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Introduction
Ahmad Alhilal is a postdoc researcher at Aalto University, Finland.
He was a postdoc researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) where he received his Ph.D.
His research interests include Cloud-Rendered XR/Mobile Gaming, Adaptive Game Streaming, HCI in Metaverse, and Edge/Cloud Computing.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - September 2022
Position
- Research and Teaching Assistant
Description
- TA of the courses: Java Programming –COMP 3021, Database Management Systems –COMP 3311, Mobile Application Development – COMP 4521, Introduction to Computing with Excel VBA – COMP 1022Q.
Education
September 2017 - September 2022
Publications
Publications (35)
Metaverse applications such as virtual reality (VR) content streaming, require optimal resource allocation strategies for mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure a high-quality user experience. In contrast to online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which can incur substantial communication overheads and longer delays, the majority of existing...
Exergaming, blending exercise and gaming, improves the physical and mental health of older adults. We currently do not fully know the factors that drive older adults to either engage in or abstain from exergaming. Large-scale studies investigating this are still scarce, particularly those studying East Asian older adults. To address this, we interv...
As mobile devices increasingly become more widely used in data analytics and machine learning, Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising decentralised approach that maintains data privacy and reduces data transmission costs. This work analyses FL performance across heterogeneous mobile devices in real deployment. We examine the impacts of device h...
Engineering education faces a gap between theory and industrial practice due to the expense, space requirements, and limited utility of industry-specific equipment. Universities thus hesitate to invest in such machinery. Metaverse provides virtually limitless digital space at minimal operational costs, facilitating avatar-based interaction and coll...
The Metaverse has emerged to extend our lifestyle beyond physical limitations. As essential components in the Metaverse, digital twins (DTs) are the real-time digital replicas of physical items. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) provides responsive services to the end users, ensuring an immersive and interactive Metaverse experience. While the digi...
VRcloud gaming enables users to play high-end VR games on lightweight devices by offloading rendering tasks to cloud servers. Despite video compression, high-definition video streaming requires substantial data transfer rates. Foveated rendering (FR) and video encoding (FVE) leverage the non-uniform perception of the human visual system to reduce c...
Pervasive Augmented Reality (AR) requires accurate pose registration of the device in real-time at a neighbourhood-to-city scale. At such a scale, most pose registration techniques suffer from exponential computational and storage costs and a significant data collection burden. This paper introduces AnchorLoc, a framework that relies on visual anch...
Mobile edge computing (MEC) resource allocation for remote rendering in virtual reality (VR) content streaming is critical for user experience. However, resource allocation becomes challenging due to the desynchronization between the physical and digital worlds in digital twin-empowered MEC. This paper presents our continual RL framework that facil...
The Metaverse connects our physical reality with virtual worlds. Social VR platforms facilitate the creation of such virtual worlds, enabling activities such as interactive teaching, conferences, and community gatherings. These activities can be performed in mixed-mode, with some participants physically present in the same location. In this paper,...
The emergence of the Metaverse enables the creation of alternative spaces at the intersection between digital and physical through the replication of physical events and objects within physical-digital twins. In this paper, we apply such twins to connected vehicles within a Traffic Metaverse as an intermediate platform for the shared perception of...
While the academic community tries to define and experiment with the metaverse, businesses and institutions seek to build their representation in the metaverse. Many educational institutions build meta-campuses and move online classes into virtual environments beyond simple videoconferencing.
This paper describes our experience building a universi...
Metaverse applications such as virtual reality (VR) content streaming, require optimal resource allocation strategies for mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure a high-quality user experience. In contrast to online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which can incur substantial communication overheads and longer delays, the majority of existing...
The metaverse is a network of shared virtual environments where people can interact synchronously through their avatars.
To enable this, it is necessary to accurately capture and recreate (physical) human motion. This is used to render avatars correctly, reflecting the motion of their corresponding users. In large-scale environments this must be do...
The Metaverse has emerged to extend our lifestyle beyond physical limitations. As essential components in the Metaverse, digital twins (DTs) are the digital replicas of physical items. End users access the Metaverse using a variety of devices (e.g., head-mounted devices (HMDs)), mostly lightweight. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and edge network...
The Metaverse has emerged as the successor of the conventional mobile internet to change people's lifestyles. It has strict visual and physical requirements to ensure an immersive experience (i.e., high visual quality, low motion-to-photon latency, and real-time tactile and control experience). However, the current communication systems fall short...
The metaverse is a network of shared virtual environments where people can interact synchronously through their avatars.
To enable this, it is necessary to accurately capture and recreate (physical) human motion. This is used to render avatars correctly, reflecting the motion of their corresponding users. In large-scale environments, this must be d...
![Figure 6: An example of visual SLAM for autonomous driving [139].](profile/Peng-Yuan-Zhou/publication/364814083/figure/fig16/AS:11431281127070612@1678936777352/An-example-of-visual-SLAM-for-autonomous-driving-139_Q320.jpg)
Since 2021, the term "Metaverse" has been the most popular one, garnering a lot of interest. Because of its contained environment and built-in computing and networking capabilities, a modern car makes an intriguing location to host its own little metaverse. Additionally, the travellers don't have much to do to pass the time while traveling, making...
![Figure 1: Overview of vehicle sensors [1] and computation and...](profile/Ahmad-Alhilal/publication/364076957/figure/fig1/AS:11431281087489392@1664636027111/Overview-of-vehicle-sensors-1-and-computation-and-communication-resources-for-two_Q320.jpg)
Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Specifically, vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications that leverage, for example, big vehicular data and machine learning. Relatedly, fi...
Human habitation across multiple planets requires communication and social connection between planets. When the infrastructure of a deep space network becomes mature, immersive cyberspace, known as the Metaverse, can exchange diversified user data and host multitudinous virtual worlds. Nevertheless, such immersive cyberspace unavoidably encounters...
Mobile cloud gaming enables high-end games on constrained devices by streaming the game content from powerful servers through mobile networks. Mobile networks suffer from highly variable bandwidth, latency, and losses that affect the gaming experience. This paper introduces Nebula, an end-to-end cloud gaming framework to minimize the impact of netw...
![Figure 1: Overview of involved on-board unites [6], computation and...](profile/Ahmad-Alhilal/publication/338737678/figure/fig1/AS:849993439133696@1579665636255/Overview-of-involved-on-board-unites-6-computation-and-communication-resources-of-2_Q320.jpg)
Recent advances in information technology have revolutionized the automotive industry, paving the way for next-generation smart vehicular mobility. Vehicles, roadside units, and other road users can collaborate to deliver novel services and applications. These services and applications require 1) massive volumes of heterogeneous and continuous data...
Mobile cloud gaming enables high-end games on constrained devices by streaming the game content from powerful servers through mobile networks. Mobile networks suffer from highly variable bandwidth, latency, and losses that affect the gaming experience. This paper introduces Nebula, an end-to-end cloud gaming framework to minimize the impact of netw...
Driven by the recent improvements in device and networks capabilities, Extended Reality (XR) is becoming more pervasive; industry and academia alike envision ambitious projects such as the metaverse. However, XR is still limited by the current architecture of mobile systems. This paper makes the case for an XR-specific operating system (XROS). Such...
Driven by the recent improvements in device and networks capabilities, Extended Reality (XR) is becoming more pervasive; industry and academia alike envision ambitious projects such as the metaverse. However, XR is still limited by the current architecture of mobile systems. This article makes the case for an XR-specific operating system (XROS). An...
Mobile cloud gaming requires a very low end-to-end latency. Edge computing significantly reduces network latency. However, in mobility scenarios, the user will frequently move out of the edge server's coverage area, requiring frequent migration of the game instance. This paper presents Talaria, an in-engine content synchronisation solution for unno...
![FIGURE 4. Satellite orbital parameters [37].](profile/Ahmad-Alhilal/publication/353026923/figure/fig6/AS:1045851258494976@1626361779755/Satellite-orbital-parameters-37_Q320.jpg)
In recent years, the number of space exploration missions has multiplied. Such an increase raises the question of effective communication between the multitude of human-made objects spread across our solar system. An efficient and scalable communication architecture presents multiple challenges, including the distance between planetary entities, th...
Speeding, slowing down, and sudden acceleration are the leading causes of fatal accidents on highways.
Anomalous driving behavior detection can improve road safety by informing drivers who are in the vicinity of dangerous vehicles.
However, detecting abnormal driving behavior at the city-scale in a centralized fashion results in considerable networ...
The increasing number of privately owned vehicles in large metropolitan cities has contributed to traffic congestion, increased energy waste, raised CO2 emissions, and impacted our living conditions negatively. Analysis of data representing citizens' driving behavior can provide insights to reverse these conditions. This article presents a large-sc...
Traffic congestion is worsening in every major city and brings increasing costs to governments and drivers. Vehicular networks provide the ability to collect more data from vehicles and roadside units, and sense traffic in real time. They represent a promising solution to alleviate traffic jams in urban environments. However, while the collected in...
Fifty years after the Apollo program, space exploration has recently been regaining popularity thanks to missions with high media coverage. Future space exploration and space station missions will require specific networks to interconnect Earth with other objects and planets in the solar system. The interconnections of these networks form the core...
The hierarchical routing protocols of WSN depend on clustering algorithm to reduce energy consumption. Theses protocols can increase scalability and lifetime of the network. Energy-efficient clustering protocols should be designed for adapt to the characteristic of energy efficiency heterogeneity of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we evalu...
Questions
Questions (12)
I'm looking for an equation/formula that relates motion-to-photon with sending bitrate in cloud gaming or VR & AR application!
Any resources?
I have developed a video streaming server-->client application in python.
I have been trying to measure the throughput (kb/s) at the receiver (client) by :
throughput = frame size/frame receiving time
However, this approach gives 2X or 3X the assigned bandwidth (using tc & netem tools), especially, for variable bandwidth like those experienced in mobile networks!. When the bandwidth changes from a value to another, the measured throughput is doubled or tripled!!
Do you have a better approach that copes with the variable bandwidth?
Any referenced or recommendations?
What is the typical packet loss rate of links between the cloud and mobile client?
Do you recommend papers or articles to cite, papers that experimentally computed the packet loss rate?
I'm working on a video streaming project. I did some experiments and I got an attached figure.
My question is:
Given the figure which shows overshooting and undershooting, have you come across a formula the estimate the latency based on source bitrate, bandwidth, and propagation delay?
Some resources like related papers, or technical reports might help in this regard!
I would like to do some experiments while applying packet loss. However, I want to follow some well-referenced packet loss settings, which consider to some extent different networks' conditions. For instance, 1% packet loss in the mobile network in driving use case (where end-user is videoconferencing or playing a video ..etc), 3% in a congested network while the is playing an online game, ..etc.
We are interested in packet losses caused at layer 3-4 (i.e., to implement erasure channels) but we are looking for the typical packet loss percentage for a variety of use cases.
My question: Is there any paper or article with justification for typical packet settings align with use cases?
I want to measure the reliability of a socket-based client-server streaming system. Therefore, I want to implement a packet erasure channel (packet loss) between the client and the server, where I can define the erasure percentage, for instance, 0% - 30% packet loss.
Any tools, configurations align with a testbed or emulation to do so?
A research paper that describes the experimental setup is also very helpful.
I'm trying to develop a prototype that employs network coding under UDP, by adding a layer under the transport layer, as shown in the figure and by by replacing TCP with UDP.
I'm looking for an example of our source code that provides a notion about the implementation. What I need is some code that takes UDP packets and performs a sort of decapsulation of their fields so that I plug in an algorithm to perform network coding.
My ultimate goal is to send video frames that adapt according to the bandwidth and network conditions.
Why 3GPP combined S-GW and P-GW in LTE to one component SGW-PGW in 5G mobile network?
The figure shows the Serving Gateway and PDN Gateway of LTE. These two components have been combined in 5G for a reason related to IP impairments and signaling issues.
Any idea or link that clarifies this point?
I was reading this paper "Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Cellular Networks:
Use Cases, Challenges and Approaches" but I couldn't find the exact answer. Which causes the delay? Is it the Serving GW or PDN GW, and why?
I want to do experiments to evaluate the communication characteristics (e.g. latency) in parallel with evaluating the computation.
I'm looking for a way to employ DSRC to connect two pcs instead of WiFi or LAN.
Could you please guide me to a good solution or workaround this issue?
I want to create a testbed for communication 2 PCs in my lab, one pc acts as server and another acts as client. I want to use 2 different communication technology (i.e. DSRC and LTE).
What are the hardware and procedures to do so, given that I want to create a socket between the tow pcs?
I have a driving dataset which contains features showing each road type (highway, primary, secondary, residential, trunk..etc), the fuel consumption, efficiency, speed on each road. Moreover, the whole trip fuel and mileage.
I want to use it to characterize the driving behavior for each car (safe or unsafe driving style), but the problem is that the dataset isn't labelled as you see in the image.
Could you please guide me to solve this issue, or recommend me some papers that solve it?
I used folium library under python to create a geographical heat map, but the map is not fancy enough. Could you please guide me to some example, project, source using a tool to generate a fancy map?
