FP7 ICT T-NOVA Kick-off meeting

Logo
FP7 ICT T-NOVA was organised and hosted at NCSR Demokritos premises by MediaNet Lab. Project T-NOVA has officially started at 1/1/2014 and its duration is 3 years. The project is coordinated by NCSRD (Dr. A. Kourtis).

With the aim of promoting the NFV concept, T-NOVA introduces a novel enabling framework, allowing operators not only to deploy virtualized Network Functions (NFs) for their own needs, but also to offer them to their customers, as value-added services. Virtual network appliances (gateways, proxies, firewalls, transcoders, analyzers etc.) can be provided on-demand as-a-Service, eliminating the need to acquire, install and maintain specialized hardware at customers’ premises.

For these purposes, T-NOVA will design and implement a management/orchestration platform for the automated provision, configuration, monitoring and optimization of Network Functions-as-a-Service (NFaaS) over virtualised Network/IT infrastructures. T-NOVA leverages and enhances cloud management architectures for the elastic provision and (re-) allocation of IT resources assigned to the hosting of Network Functions. It also exploits and extends Software Defined Networking platforms for efficient management of the network infrastructure.

Furthermore, in order to facilitate the involvement of diverse actors in the NFV scene and attract new market entrants, T-NOVA establishes a “NFV Marketplace”, in which network services and Functions by several developers can be published and brokered/traded. Via the Marketplace, customers can browse and select the services and virtual appliances which best match their needs, as well as negotiate the associated SLAs and be charged under various billing models. A novel business case for NFV is thus introduced and promoted.

T-NOVA is an Integrated Project co-funded by the European Commission / 7th Framework Programme, Grant Agreement no. 619520. Its duration is 36 months (January 2014 – December 2016).

MNL presented a study on the effects of Video Transcoding Parameters on Event Detection for Surveillance Systems

Dr. Emmanouil Kafetzakis presented a full paper at IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), held at Anaheim Marriott Hotel, California, U.S.A., 9-11 December 2013.
The ISM conference is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advances in the state of the art and practice of multimedia computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of multimedia computing.
The paper, entitled “The Impact of Video Transcoding Parameters on Event Detection for Surveillance Systems”, explains the need for transcoding and studies different video quality metrics. Commonly used algorithms for motion and person detection are briefly described, with emphasis in investigating the optimum transcoding configuration parameters. The analysis of the experimental results reveals that the existing video quality metrics are not suitable for automated systems, and that the detection of persons is affected by the reduction of bit rate and resolution, while motion detection is more sensitive to frame rate.
The paper was co-authored by C. Xilouris (NCSRD), M. A. Kourtis (NCSRD), M. Nieto (Vicomtech), I. Jargalsaikhan (Dublin City University), and S. Little (Dublin City University).
The conference proceedings will be published by the IEEE.