At the research group Intelligent Networks at TU Berlin, which is part of  Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, there are openings for the following theses:

• Evaluation of Forward Error Correction Mechanisms and Implementation in IPTV Quality Estimation Metrics (BA, MA, DA)
• Evaluation of Resend Mechanisms and Implementation in IPTV Quality Estimation Metrics (BA, MA, DA)
• Performance Evaluation of Existing Video Quality Metrics (Project, BA, MA, DA)
• Development and Implementation of error concealment
  methods for video decoding (Project, BA, MA, DA)

If you are interested in one of those, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me.

My journal paper entitled Stochastic Packet Loss Model to Evaluate QoE Impairments that appeared in issue 1 / 2009 of the PIK journal is now online.

The workshop is finally over and I’m back to Germany. All in all I have to say that IWQoS was a very interesting workshop, having contributions of a very high quality. I want to present a brief résumé  here, but I’m not giving an extensive review and thus recommend you to take a look at the program on your own.

• Two-state Markov models for describing transmission channels are still popular (e.g. used by Liu et al.)
• Algorithms in the field of Pre-Congestion Notification are subject to performance evaluations, which is a good thing in general as evaluations of RED active queue management have been published when RED was already widely deployed and thus were too late to be taken into account. It seems like this is not the case for PCN.
• An interesting contribution has been made to the field of profile based traffic classification in the work of Hu et al., where data mining techniques are applied to generate distinct behavioral application profiles. The authors present an evaluation of an rule set for BitTorrent and PPLive. In contrast to the techniques presented in our talk about Spam and Traffic Profiling techniques in 2006, this approach seems to be more flexible — at least at first sight.
• YouTube has been again subject to an extensive evaluation. In contrast to the papers presented at the Internet Measurement Conference in 2007, this paper discusses the social networks formed in YouTube and their small world character.
• The invited talk given by a colleague of David Hutchison entitled QoS: (Still) a Grand Challenged? reviewed the evolution of QoS techniques starting from ATM and Broadband ISDN. The conclusion drawn from this talk is that QoS is still a considerable challenge and security and resilience issues need to be taken more seriously, which seems to be reasonable.However, it remains to be seen whether the delivery of 100 MBit/s to the home really changes the world as much as highlighted in the talk. What is known to me about ADSL service providers is that most of the users are not extensively using the big pipe they pay for and rather stick with ocassionally using HTTP and checking their mail. In the first days of ADSL deployment, those access lines were extensively used by power users and thus resulted in a high increase of traffic in the core. However, traffic in the core increases much more slowly with a increasing number of ADSL users nowadays, as most of the users are not using their access link very extensively. I’m wondering if this will be similar for 100 Mbit/s access links in the future.