基于应用层组播的流媒体直播系统

应用层组播技术不需要网络层设备的支持，适合用于流媒体服务。在基于单播的流媒体直播系统基础上，设置应用层组播服务器，赋予客户端转发数据的能力，设计符合流媒体特点的应用层组播协议，形成了基于应用层组播的流媒体直播系统。按照该方案开发的原型系统运行状况表明，该设计方案能够稳定地提供流媒体服务。相比于基于单播的流媒体直播系统，采用应用层组播技术可以明显提高系统的用户数量，并保持较好的服务质量。     

多网融合承载的P2P直播覆盖网优化关键问题分析

P2P直播作为流媒体传输中IP组播的替代方案,其物理承载以IP单播为基础。而近年来P2P直播在实际使用中反映出IP单播在传输性能上的瓶颈。随着技术、产业和政策的发展,单播、组播和广播三种物理传输网逐渐融合,P2P覆盖网不但能够将多网的接入融合提升为应用融合,更应该利用多网融合的优势提高P2P直播的性能。从P2P直播网的应用情况、覆盖网与物理网的融合以及P2P直播分发模式三个方面,分析了直播覆盖网利用多网融合优势的关键问题,最后总结了目前P2P直播中存在的可改进因素,并指出了利用多网融合进行P2P直播技术优化的研究重点。     

Island Multicast: Combining IP Multicast With Overlay Data Distribution

Traditional overlay protocols use unicast connections to form delivery trees. While it can achieve global multicast across the Internet, it is not as efficient as IP multicast. In this paper, we integrate IP multicast into overlay data distribution to improve delivery efficiency. We investigate island multicast where unicast connections are used to connect multicast domains and IP multicast is used within multicast domains. We first explore a centralized island multicast protocol (termed CIM), which relies on a central server to construct a delivery tree. We then study a distributed protocol (termed DIM), where hosts can distributedly join islands and form a delivery tree. We study the key issues in both protocols. We also discuss how to apply these protocols to media streaming applications. We have evaluated both protocols on Internet-like topologies. We have also implemented a prototype for CIM and tested it on PlanetLab. The results show that our approaches can significantly im prove network performance as compared to pure overlay protocols. Our study shows that it is important to consider local multicast capability when designing overlay protocols.     

基于免疫算法的分层覆盖组播技术研究

为了克服传统的实时流媒体数据单播I、P组播等传输方式浪费网络带宽,甚至导致服务器过载的缺陷,提出了基于免疫算法的覆盖网络应用层组播树的构建方法。该方法以节点间网络延迟和节点的度作为约束条件,采用免疫算法划分组播岛、找出使整个系统"花费"最小的组播服务节点,实现了组播服务节点的全局最优选取。仿真结果表明,该方法有效可行,较采用传统的遗传算法具有更快的收敛速度和更高的搜索能力。     

Ant colony-based algorithm for constructing broadcasting tree with degree and delay constraints

Heterogeneous ISP router policies prevent multimedia QoS applications, such as real-time media streaming, video conferencing, and distance learning, that require IP layer multicasting from wide deployment on the Internet. Thus, recent efforts have applied application layer multicast to implement such applications by organizing the multicast group in an overlay (virtual), peer-to-peer network. Such a communication scheme can be regarded as a broadcasting problem with degree and delay constraints in the overlay network. The degree and delay-constrained broadcasting problem with minimum-cost appears to be NP-complete. This study proposes an ant colony-based algorithm to solve the difficult broadcasting problem and compares it with some related methods. The results of a series of simulations show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

P2P transfer of partial stream in multimedia multicast

In this paper, we propose a new multicast scheme that is based on the client-initiated-with-prefetching (CIWP) and peer-to-peer (P2P) transfer of a partial multimedia stream. In the CIWP scheme, when a new client joins an ongoing multicast channel, the server has to create an extra unicast channel to retransmit the partial stream that has already been transmitted. However, the unicast channel consumes some of the I/O bandwidth of the server, as well as some of the network resources between the server and the client's Internet Service Provider (ISP). To solve this problem, we propose the use of the P2P transfer algorithm to deliver the partial stream from a client that has already joined the ongoing multicast session to the newcomer. This P2P transfer between clients is limited to clients belonging to the same ISP. To further improve the performance, a threshold is used to control the P2P transfer. We performed analytical studies to show that the proposed multicast scheme can reduce the consumption of the network resources of the server, by utilizing the client's disk space. We also performed various simulation studies to demonstrate the performance improvement in terms of the use of the server's bandwidth and the waiting time for the clients’ requests.     

基于P2P系统应用层组播在流媒体中的应用

由于live流是一种高带宽的应用，甚至当为数不多的客户同时采用单播从一个源请求流时，也可以使服务器的带宽饱和。作为有效解决方法的IP组播因为缺乏广泛的支持而逐渐被应用层组播代替。本文在peer-to-peer系统上采用以树为基础的应用层组播结构，实现用客户自己的带宽传输流媒体以缓解服务器附近的拥塞问题。在该结构中，每个客户peer端在应用层与传输层之间加入peering层，实现结点之间的协调和建立、维护组播树。     

实时流覆盖组播服务网络研究

针对ISP在提供实时多媒体服务时对灵活性的需求,设计了一个基于覆盖组播的实时流网络模型,利用面向服务的方法传送语音、视频等流数据,改善了实时流应用中的QoS,较好地解决了ISP部署多媒体增值服务业务的灵活性问题。并结合NUQ应用实例,从服务控制和资源管理的角度,研究组合实时流服务和构件来实现组通信服务,并分析了满足QoS和控制资源的方法。     

Scattercast: an adaptable broadcast distribution framework

Internet broadcasting - the simultaneous distribution of live content streams to a large audience - has a number of interesting applications ranging from real-time broadcasts of audio/video streams for online concerts or sporting events to efficient and reliable large-scale software distribution. We identify three fundamental requirements for scalable broadcasting services: an efficient infrastructure for large-scale broadcasting, an ability to adapt the infrastructure to suit the requirements of a wide range of applications, and ease of deployment of the infrastructure. Although solutions such as the network-layer IP multicast approach and a slew of overlay distribution networks exist today, none of these technologies satisfactorily addresses all of the above concerns. In this paper, we argue that an application-customizable hybrid overlay is well suited to meet these challenges. To this end, we propose an architecture called scattercast that relies on a network of strategically located agents called ScatterCast proXies or SCXs. These agents collaboratively provide the broadcast service for a session. Clients locate a nearby SCX and tap into the session via that SCX. Scattercast constructs a hybrid overlay network composed of unicast links between SCXs that interconnect locally scoped multicast regions. Rather than define a single standardized service model for transmitting data on top of the overlay, scattercast builds a customizable transport framework that provides adaptability by leveraging application-defined semantics to drive the distribution of content. We demonstrate the ability of our architecture to provide efficient distribution via a set of simulation experiments. Finally, we present our experience with the adaptability of the framework by describing two applications, a real-time Internet radio and an online slide-presentation tool, both of which we have built on top of a prototype implementation of the architecture.Received: 15 March 2002, Accepted: 2 October 2002,     

OverSim:可扩展的应用层组播网络仿真框架

应用层组播作为IP组播的一个可行替代方案日益成为Internet应用研究的一个热点。如何仿真大规模、动态的应用层组播覆盖网络已经成为应用层组播方案研究人员面临的一个共同问题。本文在分析当前几款主流的覆盖网络仿真软件的基础上,提出了采用基于OMNet++网络仿真环境的Over-Sim覆盖网络仿真框架来模拟大规模、动态的应用层组播覆盖网络,并在此基础上研究分析可扩展的应用层组播方案。最后我们采用OverSim实现了对应用层组播协议Scribe的仿真并对结果进行了分析。仿真结果表明,OverSim可以在有限的硬件环境下,稳定地仿真高达上万个节点的大规模动态覆盖网络,仿真过程中内存消耗较低,且与覆盖网络规模呈线性关系。     

P2P流媒体：一种新型的流媒体服务体系

流媒体应用是推动未来宽带应用的主动力，但流媒体对带宽的高占用特性使其在Internet上大规模应用面临诸多困难。虽然IP组播能减轻服务器和网络负载，但众多原因使之在短期内难以广泛实现；CDN(Content Dellvery Network)通过把服务和内容“推”向网络的“边缘”，也能减轻服务器和网络负载。但其昂贵的费用使得一般ICPs无法承担。在Internet环境下最近兴起的P2P(Peer-to-Peer)技术在提高资源利用率、扩展服务能力等方面具有潜在的巨大优势，P2P技术在流媒体中的应用能够充分利用以往被忽视的众多客户机的资源，是一种性价比良好的流媒体服务体系。本文首先指出了P2P流媒体应用中所面临的挑战，并着重从多播树协议、QoS保证、激励机制等方面阐述了P2P流媒体的研究现状，分析讨论了存在的问题，并指出了今后的研究方向。     

Dynamic overlay multicast for live multimedia streaming in urban VANETs

Infotainment service has been a foreseeing trend in VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks), and multimedia streaming has a high potential in VANET infotainment service. This paper considers the scenario of live multimedia streaming multicast to vehicles of the same group using a dynamic application layer overlay. Due to the willingness for cooperation of non-group nodes, application layer overlay multicast is more feasible than other kinds of multicast such as network-coding-based multicast and network-layer multicast. To adapt to high mobility and full of obstacles in urban VANETs, we propose an effective dynamic overlay multicast scheme for multimedia streaming, called OMV (Overlay Multicast in VANETs). The proposed OMV enhances an overlay’s stability with two strategies: (1) QoS-satisfied dynamic overlay and (2) mesh-structure overlay. The QoS-satisfied strategy to adjust the overlay selects potential new parents based on their streams’ packet loss rates and end-to-end delays. The mesh-structure strategy allows a child to have multiple parents. We evaluate the proposed OMV in urban VANETs with obstacles using two real video clips to demonstrate the feasibility of the OMV for real videos. Evaluation results show that comparing the proposed OMV to Qadri et al.’s work, which is a static mesh overlay and is the best method available in VANETs, the packet loss rate is reduced by 27.1% and the end-to-end delay is decreased by 11.7%, with a small control overhead of 2.1%, on average. Comparing the proposed OMV for tree overlays to ALMA, which is for dynamic tree multicast overlays and is also the best method available in MANETs, the packet loss rate is reduced by 7.1% and the end-to-end delay is decreased by 13.1%. In addition, to address the problem of obstacle-prone urban VANETs, we also derive feasible stream rates and overlay sizes for city maps with different road section sizes. To the best of our knowledge, how to organize and dynamically adjust an application layer multicast overlay for live multimedia streaming have not been studied in existing VANET literatures. In summary, to deal with highly dynamic topologies in urban VANETs, we propose a QoS-satisfied strategy for group nodes to switch to new parents that can offer better QoS. The proposed OMV is feasible for live multimedia streaming applications, such as emergency live video transmission and live video tour guides for passengers in different vehicles that belong to the same multicast group.     

多组共享式应用层组播算法

利用单播传输路径的重叠特性所构建的叠加组播树可以部分模拟IP层的有源组播,而单组会话中成员主机在网络中分布的不足可以通过多组会话中的主机来弥补。该文根据这一特点提出了一种基于多组会话成员共享的应用层组播算法,该方法采用了源主机和接收主机之间的单播传输路径和多组协作机制,为每个组播源建立单独的组播树。通过模型分析,该文算法所构建的组播树可以比单组会话计算方法获得较大优势的链路利用率。     

基于P2P的流媒体技术

现有的流媒体系统一般是基于客户／服务器模式和IP组播技术,这限制了用户数量且IP组播需先得到ISP支持,故其发展受到很大限制。而在P2P网络中,每个接收数据的用户同时向外转发数据,这就充分利用了以往忽视的客户机资源。首先指出了P2P流媒体应用中所面临的挑战,并着重从应用层多播树、网络异构性、激励机制等方面阐述了P2P流媒体的研究现状,分析讨论了存在的问题,最后指出进一步的研究方向。     

New enhancements to the SOCKS communication network security protocol: Schemes and performance evaluation

In this paper we propose two new enhancements to the SOCKS protocol in the areas of IP multicasting and UDP tunneling. Most network firewalls deployed at the entrance to a private network block multicast traffic. This is because of potential security threats inherent with IP multicast. Multicasting is the backbone of many Internet technologies like voice and video conferencing, real time gaming, multimedia streaming, and online stock quotes, among others. There is a need to be able to safely and securely allow multicast streams to enter into and leave a protected enterprise network. Securing multicast streams is challenging. It poses many architectural issues. The SOCKS protocol is typically implemented in a network firewall as an application-layer gateway. Our first enhancement in the area of IP multicast to the SOCKS protocol is to enable the application of security and access control policies and safely allow multicast traffic to enter into the boundaries of a protected enterprise network. The second enhancement we propose is to allow the establishment of a tunnel between two protected networks that have SOCKS based firewalls to transport UDP datagrams.     

Multi-channel live streaming in service overlay network

Service overlay network (SON) provides an effective means to deploy quality of service (QoS)-guaranteed live streaming over today’s Internet. A major challenge in designing such a network is dealing with resource sharing among multiple channels. To achieve the best overall QoS in SON, we devise a new multi-channel live streaming scheme. First, we propose a multi-tree construction algorithm by infrastructure-based overlay multicast. The algorithm employs pre-allocated session degree constraints in overlay nodes to reserve resources for multiple channels, and constructs multiple trees by considering the total resource utilization of overlay nodes. Second, we propose a tree-aware queue scheduling algorithm to reduce the overlay processing delay in view of the entire overlay network. Scheduling priority is identified to trade off session priority with node location in different trees. From simulation and experimental results, the scheme achieves a differentiated control among different sessions, provides load balancing among overlay nodes, and improves the delay performance on SON.     

Analysis of bandwidth efficiency in overlay multicasting

Overlay multicasting has been proposed for implementing multicast routing in the application layer as a practical alternative to IP multicasting. Since a packet in overlay multicasting is transmitted via unicast routing between the end hosts, the same packet can be sent over a link multiple times, and thus the main challenge in overlay multicasting is organizing the multicast delivery trees to minimize bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we present a formal analysis of the bandwidth efficiency of overlay multicasting using a simple tree construction algorithm called BestRelay. Our analytical result shows that the bandwidth consumption of overlay multicast routing can be bounded by twice that of optimal IP multicasting. This result is confirmed using simulations.     

流媒体直播系统的多路并发流自适应传输控制

为了解决流媒体直播在Internet中传输带宽不足、用户接入多样性等问题,本文探讨了流媒体在IP网络中一般的传输控制技术,提出了一种基于联播的流媒体实时传输控制策略以适应网络带宽的动态变化。首先通过组播方式以及RTP/RTCP协议实现流媒体的实时传输;之后对自适应传输的算法进行了详细的分析和设计,并采用多线程技术实现了网络状况监测和实时码流切换控制;最后通过研究及实验数据分析对比,证明该方案可提高多路并发流传输效率的有效性,并且可以给客户端用户带来较好的用户体验。     

An overlay multicast protocol for live streaming and delay-guaranteed interactive media

In many collaborative multimedia applications, there is often a requirement for simultaneously supporting live streaming and shareable interaction. A major challenge in designing such an application by overlay multicast is how to simultaneously provide scalable live streaming and delay-guaranteed interactive media. Live streaming by overlay multicast incurs additional application-layer latency, which conflicts with the delay-sensitive property of interactive media. To handle this dilemma, in this paper, we propose a layered degree-constrained overlay multicast protocol, which organizes the overlay multicast tree as a layered degree-constrained core tree and an extended tree. The core tree maintains available resources in its top layers for subsequent two-way interaction, whereas the extended tree expands the core tree for one-way live streaming. Our simulation and experimental results show that the proposed overlay multicast protocol can simultaneously provide delay-guaranteed interactive media as well as scalable live streaming.     

Design of a Scalable Multicast Scheme With an Application-Network Cross-Layer Approach

This paper develops an efficient and scalable multicast scheme for high-quality multimedia distribution. The traditional IP multicast, a pure network-layer solution, is bandwidth efficient in data delivery but not scalable in managing the multicast tree. The more recent overlay multicast establishes the data-dissemination structure at the application layer; however, it induces redundant traffic at the network layer. We propose an application-oriented multicast (AOM) protocol, which exploits the application-network cross-layer design. With AOM, each packet carries explicit destinations information, instead of an implicit group address, to facilitate the multicast data delivery; each router leverages the unicast IP routing table to determine necessary multicast copies and next-hop interfaces. In our design, all the multicast membership and addressing information traversing the network is encoded with bloom filters for low storage and bandwidth overhead. We theoretically prove that the AOM service model is loop-free and incurs no redundant traffic. The false positive performance of the bloom filter implementation is also analyzed. Moreover, we show that the AOM protocol is a generic design, applicable for both intra-domain and inter-domain scenarios with either symmetric or asymmetric routing.