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Mobile Video Quality and Smartphone App Profiling

Prof. Prasant Mohapatra

Abstract

This talk will be focused on two aspects of the expanding usage of mobile applications, services, and devices. The first part of the talk will deal with the mobile video quality assessment, while the second part will provide insights to the smartphone applications and their overheads. Assessment of mobile videos raises unique challenges due to the unavailability of original videos, the limited computation power of mobile devices and the inherent characteristics of wireless networks (packet loss and delay). We will present a metric, Temporal Variation Metric (TVM), to measure the temporal information of videos. Despite its simplicity, it shows a high correlation coefficient with the optical flow that captures all motion information in a video. We use the TVM values to derive a reduced-reference temporal quality assessment metric, Temporal Variation Index (TVI), which quantifies the quality degradation incurred in network trans-mission. We show that TVI can also estimate the network conditions such as packet loss and delay. In the second part of the talk, we focus on identifying the overhead traffic that is generated by the free apps with respect to the paid apps. Specifically, we consider advertisements and the transmission of analytic data, as the main components of overhead traffic. The goal of this work is to quantify the cost of the overhead traffic of the popular free apps and compare it with the paid apps. We have developed an intricate methodology for identifying and measuring the bandwidth requirements of the overheads associated with the free apps. Through comprehensive measurements, we have shown that in most cases, the paid versions of the apps will indeed be a fraction of the cost to the end users when compared to the actual cost of the free versions.

Biography

Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is currently the Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chair Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He has also held Visiting Scientist positions at Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA), and Visiting Professorship at the University of Padova, Italy and KAIST and Yonsei University, South Korea. He was/is on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has chaired and has been on the program/organizational committees of several international conferences. Dr. Mohapatra is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received his doctoral degree from Penn State University in 1993, and received an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award in 2008. He also received an Outstanding Engineering Faculty award from UC Davis, and the HP Lab Innovation Award.

Dr. Mohapatra’s research interests are in the areas of wireless and mobile networks, security, and quality of experience in both wired and wireless networks. His research has been funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Intel Corporation, Siemens, Panasonic Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, AT&T, Huawei Technologies, and EMC Corporation.

Prof. Prasant Mohapatra Headshot
Prof. Prasant Mohapatra
University of California, Davis
EEB 105
13 Nov 2012, 10:30am until 11:30am