Amr Rizk

University of Duisburg-Essen | uni-due · Institut für Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik

In this paper, we present a queueing model for quantum communication networks, a rapidly growing field of research inspired by its technological promise and recent experimental successes. The model consists of a primary queue and a service queue where Bell pairs are formed and stored. The Bell pairs are by nature extremely short-lived rendering the...

Point cloud compression is essential to experience volumetric multimedia as it drastically reduces the required streaming data rates. Point attributes, specifically colors, extend the challenge of lossy compression beyond geometric representation to achieving joint reconstruction of texture and geometry. State-of-the-art methods separate geometry a...

Dynamic Point Clouds are a representation for 3D immersive media that allows users to freely navigate a scene while consuming the content. However, this comes at the cost of substantial data size, requiring efficient compression techniques to make point cloud videos accessible. Addressing this, Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) projects p...

Martingale-based techniques render sharp bounds in several queueing scenarios, but mainly in heavy-traffic and subject to the degree of burstiness. We present a related technique to render ultra-sharp bounds across all utilization levels and for various degrees of burstiness.

Transport layer congestion control relies on feedback signals that travel from the congested link to the receiver and back to the sender. This forward congestion control loop, first, requires at least one rount-trip time (RTT) to react to congestion and secondly, it depends on the downstream path after the bottleneck. The former property leads to a...

Distributed ledger technologies provide a mechanism to achieve ordering among transactions that are scattered on multiple participants with no prerequisite trust relations. This mechanism is essentially based on the idea of new transactions referencing older ones in a chain structure. Recently, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-type distributed ledgers...

Distributed ledger technologies provide a mechanism to achieve ordering among transactions that are scattered on multiple participants with no prerequisite trust relations. This mechanism is essentially based on the idea of new transactions referencing older ones in a chain structure. Recently, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-type distributed ledgers...

The advent of 5G has been a game-changer in the Automotive Vertical sector. 5G acts as an enabler of advanced networking architectures which, in turn, allow the development of novel services, by attracting and engaging third parties to experiment using available 5G infrastructure and connectivity. 5G-IANA is a Horizon 2020 ICT-41 project that targe...

A key metric to express the timeliness of status updates in latency-sensitive networked systems is the age of information (AoI), i.e., the time elapsed since the generation of the last received informative status message. This metric allows studying a number of applications including updates of sensory and control information in cyber-physical syst...

Active Queue Management (AQM) aims to prevent bufferbloat and serial drops in router and switch FIFO packet buffers that usually employ drop-tail queueing. AQM describes methods to send proactive feedback to TCP flow sources to regulate their rate using selective packet drops or markings. Traditionally, AQM policies relied on heuristics to approxim...

QoS requirements on modern network hardware, including switches and routers, demand the ability to conduct precise measurements of the packet processing and forwarding of network elements. This requires tracing packet processing and detecting the loss of packets with high timing accuracy. Current approaches for network testing rely on special and p...

We consider Time-to-Live (TTL) caches that tag every object in cache with a specific (and possibly renewable) expiration time. State-of-the-art models for TTL caches assume zero object fetch delay, i.e., the time required to fetch a requested object that is not in cache from a different cache or the origin server. Particularly, in cache hierarchies...

We consider Time-to-Live (TTL) caches that tag every object in cache with a specific (and possibly renewable) expiration time. State-of-the-art models for TTL caches assume zero object fetch delay, i.e., the time required to fetch a requested object that is not in cache from a different cache or the origin server. Particularly, in cache hierarchi...

Load balancing arises as a fundamental problem, underlying the dimensioning and operation of many computing and communication systems, such as job routing in data center clusters, multipath communication, Big Data and queueing systems. In essence, the decision-making agent maps each arriving job to one of the possibly heterogeneous servers while ai...

Scheduling decisions in parallel queuing systems arise as a fundamental problem, underlying the dimensioning and operation of many computing and communication systems, such as job routing in data center clusters, multipath communication, and Big Data systems. In essence, the scheduler maps each arriving job to one of the possibly heterogeneous serv...

Distributed Ledger Technologies provide a mechanism to achieve ordering among transactions that are scattered on multiple participants with no prerequisite trust relations. This mechanism is essentially based on the idea of new transactions referencing older ones in a chain structure. Recently, DAG-type Distributed Ledgers that are based on directe...

We analyze a data-processing system with n clients producing jobs which are processed in batches by m parallel servers; the system throughput critically depends on the batch size and a corresponding sub-additive speedup function that arises due to overhead amortization. In practice, throughput optimization relies on numerical searches for the optim...

Fixed buffer sizing in computer networks, especially the Internet, is a compromise between latency and bandwidth. A decision in favor of high bandwidth, implying larger buffers, subordinates the latency as a consequence of constantly filled buffers. This phenomenon is called Bufferbloat. Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms such as CoDel or PIE...

We analyse a data-processing system with n clients producing jobs which are processed in batches by m parallel servers; the system throughput critically depends on the batch size and a corresponding sub-additive speedup function. In practice, throughput optimization relies on numerical searches for the optimal batch size, a process that can take up...

We analyze a data-processing system with $n$ clients producing jobs which are processed in \textit{batches} by $m$ parallel servers; the system throughput critically depends on the batch size and a corresponding sub-additive speedup function. In practice, throughput optimization relies on numerical searches for the optimal batch size, a process tha...

We study job assignment in large, heterogeneous resource-sharing clusters of servers with finite buffers. This load balancing problem arises naturally in today's communication and big data systems, such as Amazon Web Services, Network Service Function Chains, and Stream Processing. Arriving jobs are dispatched to different servers, following a load...

We derive simple bounds on the queue distribution in finite-buffer queues with Markovian arrivals. The bounds capture a truncated exponential behavior, involving joint horizontal and vertical shifts of an exponential function; this is fundamentally different than existing results capturing horizontal shifts only.We also obtain similar bounds on the...

Virtual reality has been gaining popularity in recent years caused by the proliferation of affordable consumer-grade devices such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung VR. Amongst the various VR applications, 360{\deg} video streaming is currently one of the most popular ones. It allows user to change their field-of-view (FoV) based on head movemen...

Currently, there is a tremendous number of communication technology and systems in use. Not only in the private user space, but also in business operations and societal areas, they are deeply involved: Ranging from messaging services or navigation over (critical) SCADA systems to whole digital cities and communities. Consequently, the view on commu...

In this paper, we present our approach to solve the DEBS Grand challenge 2019 which consists of classifying urban objects in different scenes that originate from a LiDAR sensor. In general, at any point in time, LiDAR data can be considered as a point cloud where a reliable feature extractor and a classification model are required to be able to rec...

Virtual reality has been gaining popularity in recent years fueled by the proliferation of affordable consumer-grade devices such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Samsung VR. Amongst the various VR applications, 360° video streaming is currently one of the most popular ones. However, it poses a series of challenges to the serving content distribution...

We derive simple bounds on the queue distribution in finite-buffer queues with Markovian arrivals. The bounds capture a truncated exponential behavior, involving joint horizontal and vertical shifts of an exponential function; this is fundamentally different than existing results capturing horizontal shifts only. We also obtain similar bounds on th...

We derive simple bounds on the queue distribution in finite-buffer queues with Markovian arrivals. Our technique relies on a subtle equivalence between tail events and stopping times orderings. The bounds capture a truncated exponential behavior, involving joint horizontal and vertical shifts of an exponential function; this is fundamentally differ...

Recent approaches to tiled 360° adaptive bitrate video streaming present significant bandwidth savings at little risk of stalling when only parts of the video, e.g., the current and predicted viewport, are transferred in high quality while the rest of the 360° video tiles are transferred in a lower quality. While this is currently feasible for vide...

Parallel server frameworks are widely deployed in modern large-data processing applications. Intuitively, splitting and parallel processing of the workload provides accelerated application response times and scaling flexibility. Examples of such frameworks include MapReduce, Hadoop, and Spark. For many applications, the dynamics of such systems are...

Countless novel approaches to communication protocols, overlay networks, and distributed middleware are published every year, yet the adoption of such novel findings in the global Internet landscape progresses at a slow pace. Many of such new communication mechanisms excel (only) under specific deployment conditions, while user mobility and applica...

Recent advances in quality adaptation algorithms leave adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming architectures at a crossroads: When determining the sustainable video quality one may either rely on the information gathered at the client vantage point or on server and network assistance. The fundamental problem here is to determine how valuable either inform...

This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a generic framework for network experime...

The blockchain technology enables entities to query and alter information without trusting a middle party while providing a secure data storage in a decentralized manner. In this paper, we focus on an IT data supply chain scenario, where multiple actors negotiate a tenancy agreement for virtualized network resources. This process consists of servic...

A decisive advantage of Software-defined Networking is its support for flexible network reconfigurations. Considering that, Software-defined Networks require accurate and timely data-plane state information. Network monitoring mechanisms usually require considerable resources on SDN controllers as well as on the data-plane elements. In this work, w...

YouTube is the most popular platform for streaming of user-generated videos. Nowadays, professional YouTubers are organized in so-called multichannel networks (MCNs). These networks offer services such as brand deals, equipment, and strategic advice in exchange for a share of the YouTubers' revenues. A dominant strategy to gain more subscribers and...

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm is deemed to enable simpler and more efficient networking interaction by moving from a strict connection-based relationship between client and server to an interest-based relationship between user and content. Hence, addressing shifts to content objects rather than any specific copy or location of t...

The increasing demand for diverse, mobile applications with various degrees of Quality of Service requirements meets the increasing elasticity of on-demand resource provisioning in virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. This paper provides a dynamic optimization approach for enhanced cloud infrastructures, based on the concept of cloudlets, w...

In the past, resource sharing has been extensively studied for OLAP workloads. Naturally, the question arises, why studies mainly focus on OLAP and not on OLTP workloads? At first sight, OLTP queries - due to their short runtime - may not have enough potential for the additional overhead. In addition, OLTP workloads do not only execute read operati...

The increasing demand for diverse, mobile applications with various degrees of Quality of Service requirements meets the increasing elasticity of on-demand resource provisioning in virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. This paper provides a dynamic optimization approach for enhanced cloud infrastructures, based on the concept of cloudlets, w...

This work discusses and implements the application of speaker recognition for the detection of collaborations in YouTube videos. CATANA, an existing framework for detection and analysis of YouTube collaborations, is utilizing face recognition for the detection of collaborators, which naturally performs poor on video-content without appearing faces....

Content delivery networks (CDNs) carry more than half of the video content in today's Internet. By placing content in caches close to the users, CDNs help increasing the Quality of Experience, e.g., by decreasing the delay until a video playback starts. Existing works on CDN cache performance focus mostly on distinct caching metrics, such as hit ra...

YouTube is one of the most popular platforms for streaming of user-generated video. Nowadays, professional YouTubers are organized in so called multi-channel networks (MCNs). These networks offer services such as brand deals, equipment, and strategic advice in exchange for a share of the YouTubers' revenue. A major strategy to gain more subscribers...

State-of-the-art software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) provide the foundation for flexible and highly resilient networking. In this work, we design, implement, and evaluate a novel architecture (denoted as SABR) that leverages the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN) to provide network-assisted adaptive bitrate streaming. With clie...

Collaborative uploading describes a type of crowdsourcing scenario in networked environments where a device utilizes multiple paths over neighboring devices to upload content to a centralized processing entity such as a cloud service. Intermediate devices may aggregate and preprocess this data stream. Such scenarios arise in the composition and agg...

This paper presents MACI, the first bespoke framework for the management, the scalable execution, and the interactive analysis of a large number of network experiments. Driven by the desire to avoid repetitive implementation of just a few scripts for the execution and analysis of experiments, MACI emerged as a generic framework for network experime...

Collaborative uploading describes a type of crowdsourcing scenario in networked environments where a device utilizes multiple paths over neighboring devices to upload content to a centralized processing entity such as a cloud service. Intermediate devices may aggregate and preprocess this data stream. Such scenarios arise in the composition and agg...

Multipath TCP enables remarkable optimizations for throughput, load balancing, and mobility in today's networks. The design space of Multipath TCP scheduling, i.e., the application-aware mapping of packets to paths, is largely unexplored due to its inherent complexity. Evidence in this paper suggests that an application-aware scheduling decision, i...

The current body of research on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) contributes various adaptation algorithms aiming to optimize performance metrics such as the Quality of Experience. Intuitively, the heterogeneity of the streaming environment and the underlying technologies lead many of the developed approaches to possess clear performance...

Reproducing research results, as it is required for peer review, can be a time-consuming and difficult task. In this work, we propose three approaches to improve the way of how research results can be substantiated and discuss their applicability. Our proposals are based on a brief study on evaluation methods (for SDN research) and insights from a...

The dynamics of the application-layer-based control loop of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) make video bitrate selection for DASH a difficult problem. In this work, we provide a DASH quality adaptation algorithm, named SQUAD, that is specifically tailored to provide a high quality of experience (QoE). We review and provide new insights...

State-of-the-art Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) provide the foundation for flexible and highly resilient networking. In this work we design, implement and evaluate a novel architecture (denoted SABR) that leverages the benefits of SDN to provide network assisted Adaptive Bitrate Streaming. With clients retaining full control of their...

Despite known QoE shortcomings, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has been tied with TCP for many years now. The advent of HTTP/2 powered by transport protocols such as QUIC provides an excellent opportunity to revisit adaptive bitrate streaming with respect to QoE. QUIC promises improved congestion control, zero-RTT connection establishm...