Luca De Cicco

Polytechnic University of Bari | Poliba · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione

Multimedia content feeds an ever increasing fraction of the Internet traffic. Video streaming is one of the most important applications driving this trend. Adaptive video streaming is a relevant advancement with respect to classic progressive download streaming such as the one employed by YouTube. It consists in dynamically adapting the content bit...

Today, video distribution platforms use adaptive video streaming to deliver the maximum Quality of Experience to a wide range of devices connected to the Internet through different access networks. Among the techniques employed to implement video adaptivity, the stream-switching over HTTP is getting a wide acceptance due to its deployment and imple...

In this paper we investigate several network-assisted streaming approaches which rely on active cooperation between video streaming applications and the network. We build a Video Control Plane which enforces Video Quality Fairness among concurrent video flows generated by heterogeneous client devices. To the purpose, a max-min fairness optimization...

Applications requiring real-time communication (RTC) between Internet peers are ever increasing. Real-time communication requires not only congestion control but also minimization of queuing delays in order to provide interactivity. It is known that the well-established TCP congestion control is not suitable for real-time communication due to its r...

Adaptive video streaming systems are expected to provide the best user experience to improve service engagement. To this purpose, the video player implements a controller to dynamically choose the most suitable video representation to be downloaded. It is well-known that finding one tuning of the controller's parameters which performs satisfactoril...

A steadily increasing number of users consume videos over the Internet. In current video platforms, players run a control algorithm that dynamically chooses the video bitrate to match the time-varying network bandwidth. Such an algorithm strives to improve the quality individually perceived by users. Consequently, this control architecture leads, i...

This chapter addresses security issues in cyber-physical industrial systems. Attacks against these systems shall be handled both in terms of safety and security. Networked control technologies imposed by industrial standards already cover the safety dimension. From a security standpoint, the literature has shown that using only cyber information to...

This letter proposes a DASH‐compliant video streaming control system for 360° immersive videos. The overall system is composed of two control algorithms which dynamically cooperate both to adapt the video bitrate to match the time‐varying endto‐end network bandwidth and to select the most appropriate view of the panoramic scene in response to the v...

Video streaming services employ the Internet to distribute content to an ever-increasing number of concurrent viewers. The delivery architecture employed by leading video platforms requires players to run a control algorithm dynamically choosing the video bitrate to match the time-varying network bandwidth and avoid playback interruptions due to bu...

Services delivering videos to massive audiences are required to provide the users with a satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) to keep high engagement and avoid service abandonment. Adaptive BitRate algorithms (ABR) running in video players are designed to dynamically change the video bitrate to provide the best possible QoE given the user devic...

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications are getting increasingly popular and new services are emerging in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment, art, e‐health, and smart factories. 360° videos are an advancement of classical 2D videos giving the user the impression of being immersed at the center of a scene that can be explored freel...

Massive video delivery systems employ the HTTP protocol and multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which serve the content to the end-users on behalf of the video providers and guarantee scalability and Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, a Video Control Plane (VCP) is presented which monitors the QoE delivered by any of the CDN belongi...

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications require streaming 360° videos to implement new services in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment, art, e-health, e-learning, and smart factories. Providing a high Quality of Experience when streaming 360° videos is particularly challenging due to the very high required network bandwidth. In thi...

Cyber-physical technologies are prone to attacks, in addition to faults and failures. The issue of protecting cyber-physical systems should be tackled by jointly addressing security at both cyber and physical domains, in order to promptly detect and mitigate cyber-physical threats. Towards this end, this letter proposes a new architecture combining...

Cyber-physical technologies are prone to attacks, in addition to faults and failures. The issue of protecting cyber-physical systems should be tackled by jointly addressing security at both cyber and physical domains, in order to promptly detect and mitigate cyber-physical threats. Towards this end, this letter proposes a new architecture combining...

The use of control-theoretic solutions to detect attacks against cyber-physical industrial systems is a growing area of research. Traditional literature proposes the use of control strategies to retain, eg, satisfactory close-loop performance, as well as safety properties, when a communication network connects the distributed components of a physic...

The WebRTC initiative has achieved impressive results in terms of the gained industrial interest, the penetration of the technology in end-user devices, and the ever growing community of developers. WebRTC is today supported by major mobile platforms and Internet browsers allowing potentially billions of users to seamlessly establish real-time comm...

This article investigates several network-assisted streaming approaches that rely on active cooperation between video streaming applications and the network. We build a Video Control Plane that enforces Video Quality Fairness among concurrent video flows generated by heterogeneous client devices. For this purpose, a max-min fairness optimization pr...

We address security issues in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). We focus on the detection of attacks against cyber-physical systems. Attacks against these systems shall be handled both in terms of safety and security. Networked-control technologies imposed by industrial standards already cover the safety dimension. However, from a security standpoint,...

This work focuses on the evaluation of Web quality of experience as perceived by actual users and in particular on the impact of HTTP/1 vs HTTP/2. We adopt an experimental methodology that uses real web pages served through a realistic testbed where we control network, protocol, and application configuration. Users are asked to browse such pages an...

This paper investigates several network-assisted streaming approaches which rely on active cooperation between video streaming applications and the network. We build a Video Control Plane which enforces Video Quality Fairness among concurrent video flows generated by heterogeneous client devices. To this purpose, a max-min fairness optimization pro...

Measuring quality of Web users experience (WebQoE) faces the following trade-off. On the one hand, current practice is to resort to metrics, such as the document completion time (onLoad), that are simple to measure though knowingly inaccurate. On the other hand, there are metrics, like Google’s SpeedIndex, that are better correlated with the actual...

Adaptive video streaming systems aim at providing the best user experience given the user device and the network available bandwidth. With this purpose, a controller selecting the video bitrate (or level) from a discrete set L has to be designed. The control goal is to maximize the video bitrate while avoiding playback interruptions and minimizing...

The use of control-theoretic solutions to detect attacks against cyber-physical systems is a growing area of research. Traditional literature proposes the use of control strategies to retain, f.i., satisfactory close-loop performance, as well as safety properties, when a communication network connects the distributed components of a physical system...

We address detection of attacks against cyberphysical systems. Cyber-physical systems are industrial control systems upgraded with novel computing, communication and interconnection capabilities. In this paper we reexamine the security of a detection scheme proposed by Mo and Sinopoli (2009) and Mo et al. (2015). The approach complements the use of...

Measuring quality of Web users experience (WebQoE) faces the following trade-off. On the one hand, current practice is to resort to metrics, such as the document completion time (onLoad), that are simple to measure though knowingly inaccurate. On the other hand, there are metrics, like Google’s SpeedIndex, that are better correlated with the actual...

p>Recently, a negative interplay has been shown to arise when scheduling/Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques and low-priority congestion control protocols are used together; namely, AQM resets the relative level of priority among congestion control protocols. This work explores this issue by carrying out a control-theoretic analysis of the dyn...

Google congestion control (GCC) has been proposed for the case of delay sensitive traffic (i.e. video-conference) in the WebRTC framework. In this paper we analyze the effect of wireless channel outages on the GCC. We have observed that, when a channel outage ends, there are packets that arrive at the receiver as a burst. This behavior impairs the...

Real-time media communication requires not only congestion control, but also minimization of queuing delays to provide interactivity. In this work we consider the case of real-time communication between web browsers (WebRTC) and we focus on the interplay of an end-to-end delay-based congestion control algorithm, i.e. the Google congestion control (...

Congestion control for Web real-time communication (WebRTC) is a hot topic currently addressed at the IETF. Differently from congestion control for TCP, congestion control for WebRTC not only aims at containing packet losses, but also aims at minimizing queuing delays to provide interactivity. In this paper we describe two algorithms under discussi...

Video conferencing applications require low latency and high bandwidth. Standard TCP is not suitable for video conferencing since its reliability and in order delivery mechanisms induce large latency. Recently the idea of using the delay gradient to infer congestion is appearing again and is gaining momentum. In this paper we present an algorithm t...

The session initiation protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol for managing various types of real-time sessions between parties over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. An open issue is the control of overload situations that occur when the incoming flow of requests to a SIP server overcomes the server processing capacity. In particular, call establi...

Adaptive video streaming systems aim at providing the best user experience given the user device and the network available bandwidth. To the purpose, a controller selecting the video bitrate from a discrete set L has to be designed. The control goal is to maximize the video bitrate while avoiding playback interruptions and minimizing video bitrate...

This paper investigates " Quick UDP Internet Connections " (QUIC), which was proposed by Google in 2012 as a reliable protocol on top of UDP in order to reduce Web Page retrieval time. We first check, through experiments, if QUIC can be safely deployed in the Internet and then we evaluate the Web page load time in comparison with SPDY and HTTP. We...

Congestion control for real-time media communication over the Internet is currently being addressed in IETF and W3C bodies aiming at standardizing a set of inter-operable protocols and APIs to enable real-time communication between Web browsers. In this paper we propose a mathematical model of the congestion control algorithm for real-time flows pr...

The central component of any adaptive video streaming system is the stream-switching controller. This paper introduces TAPAS, an open-source Tool for rApid Prototyping of Adaptive Streaming control algorithms. TAPAS is a flexible and extensible video streaming client written in python that allows to easily design and carry out experimental per- for...

The optimization of massive video delivery, with the purpose of improving user engagement by delivering the maximum available quality of experience (QoE) to users, is a hot topic. In this paper we propose a Network Control Plane (NCP) for video streaming aimed at jointly maximizing users QoE and network utilization by reserving bandwidth on a per-f...

Video streaming is becoming the application generating the largest fraction of the Internet traffic. Adaptive video streaming adds to classic video streaming the feature of dynamically adapting the video bitrate to track the time-varying network available bandwidth, avoid playback interruptions and ensure the delivery of the best video quality. In...

Congestion control is a cornerstone component of the Internet. The plant dynamics can be modelled by means of an integrator, modelling a bottleneck queue, a time delay, modelling the propagation of the information from a source to a destination along with queuing, and a load disturbance, which models the time-varying available bandwidth. It has bee...

Video streaming is becoming the application generating the largest fraction of the Internet traffic. Adaptive video streaming adds to classic video streaming the feature of dynamically adapting the video bitrate to track the time-varying network available bandwidth, avoid playback interruptions and ensure the delivery of the best video quality. In...

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling framework allowing two or more parties to establish, alter, and terminate various types of media sessions. An open issue is the proper handling of overload situations that in SIP servers occur when the incoming flow of requests overcomes the processing resources. Due to overload, call establishme...

Real-time communication over the Internet is of ever increasing importance due the diffusion of portable devices, such as smart phones or tablets, with enough processing capacity to support video conferencing applications. The RTCWeb working group has been established with the goal of standardizing a set of protocols for inter-operable real-time co...

Enabling real-time communication over the Internet is of ever increasing importance due to the use of Internet for audio/video communication. The RTCWeb IETF working group has been established with the goal of standardizing a set of protocols for inter-operable real-time communication among Web browsers. In this paper we experimentally evaluate the...

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling framework that allows two or more parties to establish, alter, and terminate various types of media sessions. The mechanism employed by the standard SIP is not effective in handling overload situations that occur when the incoming flow of requests overcomes the processing resources of the server....

Video streaming accounts today for more than half of the global Internet traffic. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are employed to provide scalable and reliable video streaming services. Typically, the delivery systems are provisioned to meet the expected peak demands which are due to time-of-day effects. However, such a sizing strategy may either...

The existence of excessively large and too filled network buffers, known as bufferbloat, has recently gained attention as a major performance problem for delay-sensitive applications. One important network scenario where bufferbloat may occur is cellular networks. This paper investigates the interaction between TCP congestion control and buffering...

Adaptive video streaming is a relevant advancement with respect to classicprogressive download streaming a la YouTube.Among the different approaches, the video stream-switching technique is gettingwide acceptance, being adopted by Microsoft, Apple, and popular video streamingservices such as Akamai, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Livestream. In this pape...

In this paper, we focus on the experimental evaluation of TCP over the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), an upgrade of UMTS that is getting worldwide deployment. Today, this is particularly important in view of the "liberalization" brought in by the Linux OS which offers several variants of TCP congestion control. In particular, we conside...

Adaptive video streaming is a relevant advance- ment with respect to classic progressive download streaming such as the one employed by YouTube. Building upon its content delivery network (CDN), Akamai recently started to offer High Definition (HD) adaptive video streaming using HTTP. Nowadays, not only the amount of Internet video traffic is alway...

Congestion control is a fundamental building block in packet switching networks such as the Internet due to the fact that communication resources are shared. It has been shown that the plant dynamics is essentially made up of an integrator plus time delay and that a proportional controller plus a Smith predictor defines a simple and effective contr...

The Internet is facing a significant evolution from being a delivery network for static content to an efficient platform for multimedia content delivery. Well-known examples of applications driving this evolution are YouTube Video on Demand, Skype Audio/Video conference, IPTV and P2P video distribution. While YouTube streams videos using the Transm...

Akamai offers the largest Content Delivery Network (CDN) service in the world. Building upon its CDN, it recently started to offer High Definition (HD) video distribution using HTTP-based adaptive video streaming. In this paper we experimentally investigate the performance of this new Akamai service aiming at measuring how fast the video quality tr...

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an Internet application of ever increasing importance. The purpose of this note is to derive a mathematical model of the Skype VoIP congestion control. The proposed model is in the form of a non linear hybrid automation, and has been validated through extensive experiments. The dynamics of the Skype sending ra...

End-to-end rate-based congestion control algorithms are advocated for audio/video transport over the Internet instead of window-based protocols. Once the congestion controller has computed the sending rate, all rate-based algorithms proposed in the literature schedule packets to be sent spaced at intervals that are equal to the inverse of the desir...

Congestion control is a fundamental building block in packet switching networks such as the Internet due to the sharing of communication resources. It has been shown that the plant dynamics is essentially made of an integrator plus time delay and that a proportional controller plus a Smith predictor is a simple and effective controller. It has been...

End-to-end rate-based congestion control algorithms are advocated for audio/video transport over the Internet instead of window-based protocols. Once the congestion controller has computed the sending rate, all rate-based algorithms proposed in the literature schedule packets to be sent spaced at intervals that are equal to the inverse of the desir...

The TCP/IP stack has been extremely successful for reliable delivery of best-effort, time insensitive elastic type data traffic. Nowadays, the Internet is rapidly evolving to become an equally efficient platform for multimedia content delivery. Key examples of this evolution are, to name few, YouTube, Skype Audio/Video, IPTV, P2P video distribution...

Video content distribution over the traditional best-effort, store-and-forward Internet Protocol is of ever increasing importance due to the great success of new web services such as personal video broadcast or television over IP (IPTV). In this paper we investigate the end-to-end quality of service (QoS) that is provided by the Apple Darwin Stream...

The Internet Protocol (IP) is currently used to provide inter-networking among heterogeneous access networks. However, the evolution of and the innovation within these networks is greatly hindered by the geographical and topological rigidness of the protocol implementation that hinders the support for flexible unstructured communication paradigms....

The Internet is changing from being only an efficient platform for data delivery to become also a platform for audio/video applications. The stability of the traditional Internet is due to the TCP congestion control algorithm. However, the TCP congestion control is not optimal for VoIP applications because of its retransmission mechanism and additi...

One of TCP’s key tasks is to react and avoid network congestion episodes which normally arise in packet switched networks. A wide literature is available concerning the behaviour of congestion control algorithms in many different scenarios and several congestion control algorithms have been proposed in order to improve performances in specific scen...

The explosive growth of VoIP traffic poses a potential challenge to the stability of the Internet that, up to now, has been guaranteed by the TCP congestion control. In this paper, we investigate how Skype behaves in the presence of time-varying available bandwidth in order to discover if some sort of congestion control mechanism is implemented at...

TCP NewReno is the standard transport protocol originally designed to transport bulk data over the Internet. During the years it has been very successful to provide Internet stability due to its congestion control scheme. However TCP is not very suitable for multimedia streaming applications, that are time sensitive, because of its retransmission a...

This paper focuses on the analysis of carrier sensing mechanisms adopted by the 802.11 medium access control. Through an analytical study, a mechanism to dynamically set the Carrier Sensing Range is presented. The mechanism improves the spatial reuse by avoiding the interference of neighbor nodes. Simulation results show that setting the Carrier Se...

Wireless mesh networks are quickly emerging as a solution for broadband wireless connectivity. The physical layer technology is making remarkable progress allowing higher bandwidth and longer distance coverage than before. While standardization efforts are going on to define new standards and paradigms for Wireless Mesh Networks, many vendors sell...