The consumption of multimedia content is moving from a residential environment to mobile phones. Mobile data traffic, driven mostly by video demand, is increasing rapidly and wireless spectrum is becoming a more and more scarce resource. This makes it highly important to operate mobile networks efficiently. To tackle this, recent developments in anticipatory networking schemes make it possible to predict the future capacity of mobile devices and optimize the allocation of the limited wireless resources. Further, optimizing Quality of Experience—smooth, quick, and high quality playback—is more difficult in the mobile setting, due to the highly dynamic nature of wireless links. A key requirement for achieving, both anticipatory networking schemes and QoE optimization, is estimating the available bandwidth of mobile devices. Ideally, this should be done quickly and with low overhead.

In summary, we propose a series of improvements to the delivery of multimedia over mobile networks. Our contributions include identifying inefficiencies in the interconnection of mobile operators with the servers hosting content, proposing an algorithm to opportunistically create frequent capacity estimations suitable for use in resource optimization solutions and proposing another algorithm able to estimate the bandwidth class of a device based on minimal traffic in order to identify the ideal streaming quality its connection may support before commencing playback.

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About Foivos Michelinakis

I received my electrical and computer engineering diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in February 2011 (top 10% of class). During my subsequently army service, I was in the Research and Informatics Corps of the Greek Army, located at the School of Military Informatics for Senior Officers. Since October 2012, I am a PhD student at IMDEA Networks. During the course of my PhD studies I visited:

• Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
• Simula Research Laboratory (Simula)
• Spotify AB (Spotify)

My current research interests are in the areas of Mobile Networks, Network Optimization and Content Distribution Networks.

Personal site.

The thesis defense will be conducted in English

PhD Thesis Advisor: Dr. Joerg Widmer, IMDEA Networks Institute
University: University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain
Doctoral Program: Telematic Engineering
PhD Committee members:

• President: Ahmed Elmokashfi, Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering  And Simula Research Laboratory
• Secretary: Rubén Cuevas Rumín, Departamento de Ingeniería Telemática.
• Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
• Spokesperson: Paolo Dini, Communication Networks / Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC)