Proxy-assisted periodic broadcast for video streaming with multiple servers

Large scale video streaming over the Internet requires a large amount of resources such as server I/O bandwidth and network bandwidth. A number of video delivery techniques can be used to lower these requirements. Periodic broadcast by a central server combined with proxy caching offers a significant reduction of the aggregate network and server I/O bandwidth usage. However, the resources available to a single server are still limited. In this paper we propose a system with multiple geographically distributed servers. The problem of multiple servers for periodic broadcast is quite different from the problem of object location for multiple web servers. Multiple servers offer increased amount of resources and service availability and may potentially allow a further reduction of network bandwidth usage. On the other hand, the benefit of periodic broadcast mostly comes from high demand videos. With multiple servers holding a video, the demand of the video at each server is reduced. Therefore, it is a challenge to use multiple servers efficiently. We first analyze the dependence of the resource requirements on the number and locations of the servers. Based on the character of the function describing such a dependence, we formulate and solve the problem of video location and delivery, in a way that minimizes resource usage. We explore a trade-off between network and I/O bandwidth requirements. We evaluate our proposed solutions through a number of tests.

Performability of disk-array-based video servers

Video services are likely to dominate the traffic in future broadband networks. Most of these services will be provided by large- scale public-access video servers. Research to date has shown that disk arrays are a promising technology for providing the storage and throughput required to serve many independent video streams to a large customer population. Large disk arrays, however, are susceptible to disk failures which can greatly affect their reliability. In this paper, we discuss suitable redundancy mechanisms to increase the reliability of disk arrays and compare the performance of the RAID-3 and RAID-5 redundancy schemes. We use cost and performability analyses to rigorously compare the two schemes over a variety of conditions. Accurate cost models are developed and Markov reward models (with time-dependent reward structures) are developed and used to give insight into the tradeoffs between system cost and revenue earning potential. The paper concludes that for large-scale video servers, coarse-grained striping in a RAID-5 style of disk array is most cost effective.     

Methodologies for designing video servers

This paper proposes an approach for integrating CPU/disk/network scheduling and memory management for supporting a variety of VCR operations and dynamic service changes efficiently. Under this approach we can optimize individual resources, and support a maximal number of clients on a given system. We present a framework of service modeling to characterize the requested video services and identify the scheduling parameters for supporting these services. A number of techniques and methodologies are developed for analyzing the behaviors of disk accesses, network operations, and CPU activities under the loads of both single and multiple clients. We also describe an admission control strategy that utilizes information about all the system resources to determine if a set of video services is acceptable     

More than watching: An empirical and experimental examination on the impacts of live streaming user-generated video consumption

Live streaming user-generated video (UGV), a nascent format of crowdsourced content, has grown massive popularity among social media users and is believed to have substantial potential business influences. However, industry practitioners express concerns regarding this new form on social media platforms and the influences of live streaming UGV consumption lack research. Motivated such, through a uniquely merged dataset from the video game industry, we conduct a series of panel time-series empirical analyses to investigate the business value of live streaming UGV consumption. Further, we propose a conceptual framework based on the sense of community literature to understand the consequences of live streaming UGV consumption and verify it through several online experiments. This research contributes to the IS literature by shedding light on the influences of emergent crowdsourced content, providing a conceptual framework to existing literature, and offering rich managerial implications and guidelines to managers regarding utilizing live streaming UGVs.     

Design a progressive video caching policy for video proxy servers

Proxy servers have been used to cache web objects to alleviate the load of the web servers and to reduce network congestion on the Internet. In this paper, a central video server is connected to a proxy server via wide area networks (WANs) and the proxy server can reach many clients via local area networks (LANs). We assume a video can be either entirely or partially cached in the proxy to reduce WAN bandwidth consumption. Since the storage space and the sustained disk I/O bandwidth are limited resources in the proxy, how to efficiently utilize these resources to maximize the WAN bandwidth reduction is an important issue. We design a progressive video caching policy in which each video can be cached at several levels corresponding to cached data sizes and required WAN bandwidths. For a video, the proxy server determines to cache a smaller amount of data at a lower level or to gradually accumulate more data to reach a higher level. The proposed progressive caching policy allows the proxy to adjust caching amount for each video based on its resource condition and the user access pattern. We investigate the scenarios in which the access pattern is priorly known or unknown and the effectiveness of the caching policy is evaluated.     

视频网格服务器存储容量模型研究

针对基于内容分发网络(CDN)技术的视频网格中中心与区域服务器存储系统的不同职能,分析了在不同影片数量规模和分布特征情况下,随着区域服务器相对存储容量的增加,本地服务率上升的规律,在本地服务率增长的临界点附近得出了较为经济的、以中心服务器存储容量为基准的区域服务器的相对存储容量,该容量兼顾了区域服务器本地服务率和存储系统的硬件投资,能够为实际视频网格的建设提供参考。     

Automatic composition of broadcast sports video

This study examines an automatic broadcast soccer video composition system. The research is important as the ability to automatically compose broadcast sports video will not only improve broadcast video generation efficiency, but also provides the possibility to customize sports video broadcasting. We present a novel approach to the two major issues required in the system’s implementation, specifically the camera view selection/switching module and the automatic replay generation module. In our implementation, we use multi-modal framework to perform video content analysis, event and event boundary detection from the raw unedited main/sub-camera captures. This framework explores the possible cues using mid-level representations to bridge the gap between low-level features and high-level semantics. The video content analysis results are utilized for camera view selection/switching in the generated video composition, and the event detection results and mid-level representations are used to generate replays which are automatically inserted into the broadcast soccer video. Our experimental results are promising and found to be comparable to those generated by broadcast professionals.     

Proxy servers for scalable interactive video support

Targeting scalability, load balance and resource efficiency in streaming multimedia applications, proxy servers facilitate faster real-time access to cached objects and reduce response time to document requests     

An experimental analysis of digital video library servers

Much work on video servers has concentrated on movies on demand, in which a relatively small number of titles are viewed and users are given basic VCR-style controls. This paper concentrates on analyzing video server performance for non-linear access applications. In particular, we study two non-linear video applications: video libraries, in which users select from a large collection of videos and may be interested in viewing only a small part of the title; and video walk-throughs, in which users can move through an image-mapped representation of a space. We present a characterization of the workloads of these applications. Our simulation studies show that video server architectures developed for movies on demand can be adapted to video library usage, though caching is less effective and the server can support a smaller user population for non-linear video applications. We also show that video walk-throughs require extremely large amounts of RAM buffering to provide adequate performance for even a small number of users.     

Throughput optimization for video streaming proxy servers based on video staging

A video streaming proxy server needs to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections between media servers and clients. Inside, every video arrived at the server and delivered from it follows a specific arrival and delivery schedule. While arrival schedules compete for incoming network bandwidth, delivery schedules compete for outgoing network bandwidth. As a result, a proxy server has to provide sufficient buffer and disk cache for storage, together with memory space, disk space and disk bandwidth. In order to optimize the throughput, a proxy server has to govern the usage of these resources. In this paper, we first analyze the property of a traditional smoothing algorithm and a video staging algorithm. Then we develop, based on the smoothing algorithm, a video staging algorithm for video streaming proxy servers. This algorithm allows us to devise an arrival schedule based on the delivery schedule. Under this arrival and delivery schedule pair, we can achieve a better resource utilization rate gracefully between different parameter sets. It is also interesting to note that the usage of the resources such as network bandwidth, disk bandwidth and memory space becomes interchangeable. It provides the basis for inter-resource scheduling to further improve the throughput of a video streaming proxy server system.

Adaptive robust video broadcast via satellite

With increasing demand for multimedia content over channels with limited bandwidth and heavy packet losses, higher coding efficiency and stronger error resiliency is required more than ever before. Both the coding efficiency and error resiliency are two opposing processes that require appropriate balancing. On the source encoding side the video encoder H.264/AVC can provide higher compression with strong error resiliency, while on the channel error correction coding side the raptor code has proven its effectiveness, with only modest overhead required for the recovery of lost data. This paper compares the efficiency and overhead of both the raptor codes and the error resiliency techniques of video standards so that both can be balanced for better compression and quality. The result is also improved by confining the robust stream to the period of poor channel conditions by adaptively switching between the video streams using switching frames introduced in H.264/AVC. In this case the video stream is initially transmitted without error resiliency assuming the channel to be completely error free, and then the robustness is increased based on the channel conditions and/or user demand. The results showed that although switching can increase the peak signal to noise ratio in the presence of losses but at the same time its excessive repetition can be irritating to the viewers. Therefore to evaluate the perceptual quality of the video streams and to find the optimum number of switching during a session, these streams were scored by different viewers for quality of enhancement. The results of the proposed scheme show an increase of 3 to 4 dB in peak signal to noise ratio with acceptable quality of enhancement.     

Enabling video privacy through computer vision

Closed-circuit television cameras used today for surveillance sometimes enable privacy intrusion. The authors' privacy console manages operator access to different versions of video-derived data according to access-control lists. Additionally, their PrivacyCam is a smart camera that produces a video stream with privacy-intrusive information already removed.     

直播服务器一般性框架体系设计

基于流媒体服务器设计框架,结合直播服务器本身的功能、特性,并综合考虑波动的网络环境对其的影响,给出一种适用于直播服务器的一般性的实现框架。在这个实现框架中直播服务器由四个功能模块组成:速率控制模块、差错控制模块、质量自适应模块以及缓冲区控制模块。这四个功能模块各自完成特定的功能,并相互协作以使直播服务器系统作为整体提供适应性的视频传输服务。对各功能模块之间的协作和互动关系作了详细的阐述。提出的框架体系可以根据应用需求进行灵活配置以得到适当的实现形式,对开发直播系统具有参考价值。     

Doubly-striped disk mirroring: Reliable storage for video servers

Disk striping is essential in Video-On-Demand servers to allow concurrent access for a large number of users to the same copy of a video object. On the other hand, disk striping makes the system more vulnerable to component failures. We propose a replication scheme for video content and an associated I/O scheduling algorithm that enables the system to tolerate a component failure. The scheme, called doubly-striped mirrors, compares favorably to other approaches for implementing redundancy such as RAID in terms of cost, bandwidth efficiency, buffer usage and system availability.     

面向视频播放的BT协议下载算法的改进

P2P协议应用于视频播放是一项热门技术,BT协议作为P2P协议族中的成熟协议,其在文件共享下载方面有着优异的表现。从BT协议的优先级桶式下载算法出发,提出基于速度评价的片选择下载算法,该算法适应视频播放实时性和平滑性要求,使得BT协议成功应用于视频播放,从而为BT协议的应用提供了一种新的商业模式。     

Modeling and performance comparison of reliability strategies fordistributed video servers

Large scale video servers are typically based on disk arrays that comprise multiple nodes and many hard disks. Due to the large number of components, disk arrays are susceptible to disk and node failures that can affect the server reliability. Therefore, fault tolerance must be already addressed in the design of the video server. For fault tolerance, we consider parity-based as well as mirroring-based techniques with various distribution granularities of the redundant data. We identify several reliability schemes and compare them in terms of the server reliability and per stream cost. To compute the server reliability, we use continuous time Markov chains that are evaluated using the SHARPE software package. Our study covers independent disk failures and dependent component failures. We propose a new mirroring scheme called Grouped One-to-One scheme that achieves the highest reliability among all schemes considered. The results of this paper indicate that dividing the server into independent groups achieves the best compromise between the server reliability and the cost per stream. We further find that the smaller the group size, the better the trade-off between a high server reliability and a low per stream cost     

Efficient support for interactive operations in multi-resolution video servers

In this paper, we present a placement algorithm that interleaves multi-resolution video streams on a disk array and enables a video server to efficiently support playback of these streams at different resolution levels. We then combine this placement algorithm with a scalable compression technique to efficiently support interactive scan operations (i.e., fast-forward and rewind). We present an analytical model for evaluating the impact of the scan operations on the performance of disk-arr ay-based servers. Our experiments demonstrate that: (1) employing our placement algorithm substantially reduces seek and rotational latency overhead during playback, and (2) exploiting the characteristics of video streams and human perceptual tolerances enables a server to support interactive scan operations without any additional overhead.     

An enhanced client-centric approach for efficient video broadcast

Periodic broadcast is a cost-effective solution for large-scale distribution of popular videos. Regardless of the number of video requests, this strategy guarantees a constant worst service latency to all clients, making it possible to serve a large community with a minimal amount of broadcast bandwidth. Although many efficient periodic broadcast techniques have been proposed, most of them impose rigid requirements on client receiving bandwidth. They either demand clients to have the same bandwidth as the video server, or limit them to receive no more than two video streams at any one time. In our previous work, we addressed this problem with a Client-Centric Approach (CCA). This scheme takes into consideration both server broadcast bandwidth and client receiving bandwidth and allows clients to use all their receiving capability for prefetching broadcast data. As a result, given a fixed broadcast bandwidth, a shorter broadcast period can be achieved with an improved client communication capability. In this paper, we present an enhanced version of CCA to further leverage client bandwidth for more efficient video broadcast. The new scheme reduces the broadcast latency up to 50% as compared to CCA. We prove the correctness of this new technique and provide an analytical evaluation to show its performance advantage as compared with some existing techniques.

Bayesian belief network based broadcast sports video indexing

This paper presents a probabilistic Bayesian belief network (BBN) method for automatic indexing of excitement clips of sports video sequences. The excitement clips from sports video sequences are extracted using audio features. The excitement clips are comprised of multiple subclips corresponding to the events such as replay, field-view, close-ups of players, close-ups of referees/umpires, spectators, players’ gathering. The events are detected and classified using a hierarchical classification scheme. The BBN based on observed events is used to assign semantic concept-labels to the excitement clips, such as goals, saves, and card in soccer video, wicket and hit in cricket video sequences. The BBN based indexing results are compared with our previously proposed event-association based approach and found BBN is better than the event-association based approach. The proposed scheme provides a generalizable method for linking low-level video features with high-level semantic concepts. The generic nature of the proposed approach in the sports domain is validated by demonstrating successful indexing of soccer and cricket video excitement clips. The proposed scheme offers a general approach to the automatic tagging of large scale multimedia content with rich semantics. The collection of labeled excitement clips provide a video summary for highlight browsing, video skimming, indexing and retrieval.