Adaptive interface selection over cloud-based split-layer video streaming via multi-wireless networks

As mobile devices such as tablet PCs and smartphones proliferate, the online video consumption over a wireless network has been accelerated. From this phenomenon, there are several challenges to provide the video streaming service more efficiently and stably in the heterogeneous mobile environment. In order to guarantee the QoS of real-time HD video services, the steady and reliable wireless mesh is necessary. Furthermore, the video service providers have to maintain the QoS by provisioning streaming servers to respond the clients’ request of different video resolution. In this paper, we propose a reliable cloud-based video delivery scheme with the split-layer SVC encoding and real-time adaptive multi-interface selection over LTE and WiFi links. A split-layer video streaming can effectively scale to manage the required channels on each layer of various client connections. Moreover, split-layer SVC model brings streaming service providers a remarkable opportunity to stream video over multiple interfaces (e.g. WiFi, LTE, etc.) with a separate controlling based on their network status. Through the adaptive interface selection, the proposed system aims to ensure the maximizing video quality which the bandwidth of LTE/WiFi accommodates. In addition, the system offers cost-effective streaming to mobile clients by saving the LTE data consumption. In our system, an adaptive interface selection is developed with two different algorithms, such as INSTANT and EWMA methods. We implemented a prototype of mobile client based on iOS particularly by using iPhone5S. Moreover, we also employ the split-layer SVC encodes in streaming server-side as the add-on module to SVC reference encoding tool in a virtualized environment of KVM hypervisor. We evaluated the proposed system in an emulated and a real-world heterogeneous wireless network environments. The results show that the proposed system not only achieves to guarantee the highest quality of video frames via WiFi and LTE simultaneous connection, but also efficiently saves LTE bandwidth consumption for cost-effectiveness to client-side. Our proposed method provides the highest video quality without deadline misses, while it consumes 50.6% LTE bandwidth of ‘LTE-only’ method and 72.8% of the conventional (non-split) SVC streaming over a real-world mobile environment.     

一种基于节的视频服务器允许接纳控制算法

提出了一种基于“服务器节”的支持压缩多媒体流的服务器中CPU、磁盘、网络和内存等资源管理的方法和允许接纳控制算法。“服务器节”概念定义了一组客户视频服务特性,如播放、快进、慢进和暂停等,并且确定了视频服务所需资源的分配参。一个“服务器节”包括视频服务器、磁盘设备、网络设备和允许接纳控制。它不但能优化使用单个资源,对于给定系统支持最大数量的客户端,保证其服务质量（QoS),而且其允许接纳控制算法能根据系统所有资源的状况,在不影响原有的视频服务基础上,确定对客户端新提出的视频服务是否接受。     

Server side,play buffer based quality control for adaptive media streaming

Existing media streaming protocols provide bandwidth adaptation features in order to deliver seamless video streams in an abrupt bandwidth shortage on the networks. For instance, popular HTTP streaming protocols such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MPEG-DASH are designed to select the most appropriate streaming quality based on client side bandwidth estimation. Unfortunately, controlling the quality at the client side means the effectiveness of the adaptive streaming is not controlled by service providers, and it harms the consistency in quality-of-service. In addition, recent studies show that selecting media quality based on bandwidth estimation may exhibit unstable behavior in certain network conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate that the drawbacks of existing protocols can be overcome with a server side, buffer based quality control scheme. Server side quality control solves the service quality problem by eliminating client assistance. Buffer based control scheme eliminates the side effects of bandwidth based stream selection. We achieve this without client assistance by designing a play buffer estimation algorithm. We prototyped the proposed scheme in our streaming service testbed which supports pre-transcoding and live-transcoding of the source media file. Our evaluation results show that the proposed quality control performs very well both in simulated and real environments.     

Optimized streaming media proxy and its applications

Multimedia streaming is one of the most popular services on the current Internet. However, the major problem hinders streaming media applications is the network bandwidth. In this paper, we put forward a optimized streaming proxy system and think of utilizing it in peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. The main contribution of our proxy system is RTP segments splicing, prefix caching size determination and prefetching techniques, which are detailed discussed in this paper. By validating our implementation, the experimental results show that the streaming proxy can effectively contribute to reduce the server and backbone network load, thus achieve improved media quality and scalability. In addition, P2P network is a fascinate way for Internet resource sharing, many of researchers are devoting to research on P2P-based client communications. In our project, we make use of our proxy prototype into the streaming sharing over P2P network, each peer node just like a lightweight proxy between the server and the target peers. The real-time video sharing (RVS) system efficiently utilizes network bandwidth between peer clients through combining with our proxy as expected.     

Loopback: exploiting collaborative caches for large-scale streaming

In this paper, we propose a Loopback approach in a two-level streaming architecture to exploit collaborative client/proxy buffers for improving the quality and efficiency of large-scale streaming applications. At the upper level we use a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver video from a central server to proxy servers. At the lower level a proxy server delivers video with the help of collaborative client caches. In particular, a proxy server and its clients in a local domain cache different portions of a video and form delivery loops. In each loop, a single video stream originates at the proxy, passes through a number of clients, and finally is passed back to the proxy. As a result, with limited bandwidth and storage space contributed by collaborative clients, we are able to significantly reduce the required network bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, and cache space of a proxy. Furthermore, we develop a local repair scheme to address the client failure issue for enhancing service quality and eliminating most required repairing load at the central server. For popular videos, our local repair scheme is able to handle most of single-client failures without service disruption and retransmissions from the central server. Our analysis and simulations have shown the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Harmonic proportional bandwidth allocation and scheduling for service differentiation on streaming servers

To provide ubiquitous access to the proliferating rich media on the Internet, scalable streaming servers must be able to provide differentiated services to various client requests. Recent advances of transcoding technology make network-I/O bandwidth usages at the server communication ports controllable by request schedulers on the fly. In this article, we propose a transcoding-enabled bandwidth allocation scheme for service differentiation on streaming servers. It aims to deliver high bit rate streams to high priority request classes without overcompromising low priority request classes. We investigate the problem of providing differentiated streaming services at application level in two aspects: stream bandwidth allocation and request scheduling. We formulate the bandwidth allocation problem as an optimization of a harmonic utility function of the stream quality factors and derive the optimal streaming bit rates for requests of different classes under various server load conditions. We prove that the optimal allocation, referred to as harmonic proportional allocation, not only maximizes the system utility function, but also guarantees proportional fair sharing between classes with different prespecified differentiation weights. We evaluate the allocation scheme, in combination with two popular request scheduling approaches, via extensive simulations and compare it with an absolute differentiation strategy and a proportional-share strategy tailored from relative differentiation in networking. Simulation results show that the harmonic proportional allocation scheme can meet the objective of relative differentiation in both short and long timescales and greatly enhance the service availability and maintain low queueing delay when the streaming system is highly loaded.     

Dynamic real-time scheduling strategies for interactive continuous media servers

In this paper, we propose and study a dynamic approach to schedule real-time requests in a video-on-demand (VOD) server. Providing quality of service in such servers requires uninterrupted and on-time retrieval of motion video data. VOD services and multimedia applications further require access to the storage devices to be shared among multiple concurrent streams. Most of the previous VOD scheduling approaches use limited run-time,0 information and thus cannot exploit the potential capacity of the system fully. Our approach improves throughput by making use of run-time information to relax admission control. It maintains excellent quality of service under varying playout rates by observing deadlines and by reallocating resources to guarantee continuous service. It also reduces start-up latency by beginning service as soon as it is detected that deadlines of all real-time requests will be met. We establish safe conditions for greedy admission, dynamic control of disk read sizes, fast initial service, and sporadic services. We conduct thorough simulations over a wide range of buffer capacities, load settings, and over varying playout rates to demonstrate the significant improvements in quality of service, throughput and start-up latency of our approach relative to a static approach.     

基于P2P的用户生产内容视频资源查找策略

现有用户生产内容(UGC)类视频系统通常采用C/S架构设计,导致了视频服务器极大的带宽压力。提出一种采用对等网(P2P)的在线短视频查找策略——FastSearch,其目的是利用视频资源之间的关联关系进行视频资源定位,以显著提高点播节点之间的视频分享效率并降低对视频服务器的带宽需求。实验表明FastSearch具备良好的视频数据源节点查找能力,集成了该查找策略的短视频系统能有效减少对视频服务器的带宽消耗。     

Cooperative Media Data Streaming with Scalable Video Coding

Live peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming has become a promising approach for broadcasting non-interactive media content from a server to a large number of interested clients. However, it still faces many challenges such as high churn rate of peer clients, uplink bandwidth constraints of participating peers, and heterogeneity of client throuput capacities. This paper presents a new P2P network called LSONet, a collaborative peer-to-peer streaming framework for scalable layer-encoded bit streams. The contributions are the combination of the advantages of both layered conding and mesh-based packet exchange. With layered coding, it overcomes overlay bandwidth limitatioins and heterogeneity of client capacities. With mesh based overlay streaming, it can better handle peer churns, as compared to tree-based solutions. For achieving these targets, this paper employs a gossip-based data-driven scheme for partnership formation, and proposes two algorithms, optimized transmission policy (OTP) and graceful degradation scheme (GDS), for multi-layers allocation. The proposed system is completely self-organizing, and in a fully distributed fashion. Extensive simulations show that LSONet achieves higher quality of service by peer-assisted streaming and layered video coding. Also, through comparison, results show that the system outperforms some previous schemes in resource utilization and is more robust and resilient for nodes departure, which demonstrate that it is well-suited for quality adaptive live streaming applications.     

基于联邦共识机制的多视频流带宽分配策略

针对瓶颈链路中视频带宽分配不均导致的用户QoE不公平以及带宽利用率低的问题,提出了一种基于联邦深度强化学习的分布式视频流公平调度策略。该策略能够根据客户端网络状态和视频QoE等级动态生成带宽分配权重因子,服务器端的拥塞控制算法则根据带宽分配权重因子为瓶颈链路中的每个视频流分配带宽,以保障瓶颈链路中视频流的公平传输。每个视频终端都运行一个带宽分配agent,且多个agent以联邦学习的方式周期性地训练,以便代理模型能够快速收敛。带宽分配agent通过共识机制同步联邦训练参数,实现了在异步播放请求条件下带宽分配agent模型参数的分布式聚合,并确保了agent模型参数的安全共享。实验结果表明,与最新方案相比,提出策略在QoE公平性和整体QoE效率方面分别提高了10%和7%,这表明提出策略在解决视频流带宽分配不均问题和提升用户体验方面具有潜力和有效性。     

An HTTP/2 Push-Based Approach for Low-Latency Live Streaming with Super-Short Segments

Over the last years, streaming of multimedia content has become more prominent than ever. To meet increasing user requirements, the concept of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has recently been introduced. In HAS, video content is temporally divided into multiple segments, each encoded at several quality levels. A rate adaptation heuristic selects the quality level for every segment, allowing the client to take into account the observed available bandwidth and the buffer filling level when deciding the most appropriate quality level for every new video segment. Despite the ability of HAS to deal with changing network conditions, a low average quality and a large camera-to-display delay are often observed in live streaming scenarios. In the meantime, the HTTP/2 protocol was standardized in February 2015, providing new features which target a reduction of the page loading time in web browsing. In this paper, we propose a novel push-based approach for HAS, in which HTTP/2’s push feature is used to actively push segments from server to client. Using this approach with video segments with a sub-second duration, referred to as super-short segments, it is possible to reduce the startup time and end-to-end delay in HAS live streaming. Evaluation of the proposed approach, through emulation of a multi-client scenario with highly variable bandwidth and latency, shows that the startup time can be reduced with 31.2% compared to traditional solutions over HTTP/1.1 in mobile, high-latency networks. Furthermore, the end-to-end delay in live streaming scenarios can be reduced with 4 s, while providing the content at similar video quality.     

iGridMedia: The system to provide low delay peer-to-peer live streaming service over internet

Commercial peer-to-peer live streaming services are getting popular nowadays, however, almost all systems target non-interactive applications. Few systems can address how to support interactive applications (such as online auction, person interview, video sharing & commenting, etc.) with peer-to-peer streaming technology. In an interactive channel, all or part of the participants can interact with the presenter or publisher at the source. Unlike existing P2P streaming service, there is different level of delay and synchronization requirements in interactive applications, meanwhile, the participant number in each channel is relatively small but the concurrent channel number is large. With such challenges, how much server bandwidth can be saved in P2P streaming is an interesting problem. We propose a very practical protocol iGridMedia and fully implement it. The basic tradeoff between consumed server bandwidth and the required delay is carefully studied. Simulation and real-world experiments show that our system consumes little server bandwidth under low delay even if the peer churn rate is very high and the peer bandwidth resource index is very limited.     

Bandwidth guaranteed multicast scheduling for virtual output queued packet switches

Multicast enables efficient data transmission from one source to multiple destinations, and has been playing an important role in Internet multimedia applications. Although several multicast scheduling schemes for packet switches have been proposed in the literature, they usually aim to achieve only short multicast latency and high throughput without considering bandwidth guarantees. However, fair bandwidth allocation is critical for the quality of service (QoS) of the network, and is necessary to support multicast applications requiring guaranteed performance services, such as online audio and video streaming. This paper addresses the issue of bandwidth guaranteed multicast scheduling on virtual output queued (VOQ) switches. We propose the Credit based Multicast Fair scheduling (CMF) algorithm, which aims at achieving not only short multicast latency but also fair bandwidth allocation. CMF uses a credit based strategy to guarantee the reserved bandwidth of an input port on each output port of the switch. It keeps track of the difference between the reserved bandwidth and actually received bandwidth, and minimizes the difference to ensure fairness. Moreover, in order to fully utilize the multicast capability provided by the switch, CMF lets a multicast packet simultaneously send transmission requests to multiple output ports. In this way, a multicast packet has more chances to be delivered to multiple destination output ports in the same time slot and thus to achieve short multicast latency. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of CMF, and the results demonstrate that CMF achieves the two design goals: fair bandwidth allocation and short multicast latency.     

Design and implementation of a service oriented architecture for peer-assisted video-on-demand

Compared with the traditional client/server streaming model, peer-assisted video streaming has been shown to provide better scalability with lower infrastructure cost. In this paper, we describe how peer-assisted video streaming can be implemented through real-time service oriented architecture. The first part of the paper presents an overall design of the Peer-Assisted ContenT Service (PACTS). We discuss the motivation, principles and service oriented architecture of PACTS modules and specify the workflow among them. By organizing elements of traditional video streaming and peer-to-peer computing into loosely-coupled composable middleware services and distributing them among participating entities, PACTS enables high-quality low-cost video streaming at a large scale and in real time. The second part of the paper describes an implementation of PACTS using existing off-the-shelf software followed by a performance evaluation based on practical environment settings. We illustrate the challenges and our approaches in designing distributed and highly efficient algorithms. In particular, the algorithms for performing peering-selection and incentive-driven pre-fetching are studied in detail. These designs are extensively evaluated by packet-level simulations. We show that our implementation of PACTS effectively offload server’s bandwidth demand without sacrificing the service quality. This benefit is further verified in dynamic settings with system churns. The simulation results show that the incentive mechanism from our service level agreement efficiently stabilizes the server bandwidth utilization with less than 4.5% control traffic overhead.     

Minimizing bandwidth requirements for on-demand data delivery

Two recent techniques for multicast or broadcast delivery of streaming media can provide immediate service to each client request, yet achieve considerable client stream sharing which leads to significant server and network bandwidth savings. The paper considers: 1) how well these recently proposed techniques perform relative to each other and 2) whether there are new practical delivery techniques that can achieve better bandwidth savings than the previous techniques over a wide range of client request rates. The principal results are as follows: First, the recent partitioned dynamic skyscraper technique is adapted to provide immediate service to each client request more simply and directly than the original dynamic skyscraper method. Second, at moderate to high client request rates, the dynamic skyscraper method has required server bandwidth that is significantly lower than the recent optimized stream tapping/patching/controlled multicast technique. Third, the minimum required server bandwidth for any delivery technique that provides immediate real-time delivery to clients increases logarithmically (with constant factor equal to one) as a function of the client request arrival rate. Furthermore, it is (theoretically) possible to achieve very close to the minimum required server bandwidth if client receive bandwidth is equal to two times the data streaming rate and client storage capacity is sufficient for buffering data from shared streams. Finally, we propose a new practical delivery technique, called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM), which has a required server bandwidth that is lower than the partitioned dynamic skyscraper and is reasonably close to the minimum achievable required server bandwidth over a wide range of client request rates     

基于P2P视频点播技术的流媒体平台设计与开发

随着流媒体应用在Internet上的流行,传统C/S模式的流媒体服务系统已经不能满足流媒体对服务器性能和高带宽的要求,严重阻碍了流媒体业务质量的提高和容量的扩大。本文介绍一种基于P2P网络的流媒体播放技术,它将P2P网络技术和流媒体技术结合起来,充分利用客户计算机的资源,减轻流媒体服务器和网络负载,突破了传统的流媒体播放系统带宽瓶颈,能够保持播放节目流完整而流畅。本文还采用MVC模式和Java语言以面向对象方法设计和开发P2P流媒体网站,利用P2P流媒体技术,实现校园流媒体的视频点播。     

A new fast friendly window-based congestion control for real-time streaming media transmission

1 Introduction In the current Internet, not all applications use TCP and they do not follow the same concept of fairly sharing the available bandwidth. The rapid growing of real-time streaming media applications will bring much UDP traffic without integrating TCP compatible congestion control mechanism into Internet. It threats the quality of service (QoS) of real-time applications and the stability of the current Internet. For this reason, it is desirable to define appropriate rate rule…     

Dynamic Scheme Transition Adaptable to Variable Video Popularity in a Digital Broadcast Network

To provide on-demand video streaming services through the network, video objects with both high and low client request rates must be served efficiently. In this paper, we propose a dynamic scheme transition to provide on-demand streaming services efficiently regardless of video popularity. This approach can maintain quality-of-service (QoS) by transitioning the service scheme according to the request rate. The server provides services by heuristically broadcasting video segments when the video popularity is low and by a Periodic Broadcast when the video popularity is high. The server identifies the variations in client request rates from the number of service channels and determines transitions to more efficient service schemes autonomously. We evaluated this scheme transition for various parameters and traces from a company providing streaming services. The results show that the performance of scheme transition is very efficient.