Categorization-based video streaming for traffic mitigation in content delivery services

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This paper presents a categorization-based video streaming approach (CVS) to mitigate the Internet traffic in content delivery services. The CVS uses the...     

多端交通视频分析任务卸载决策

针对智慧交通中多点位监控视频分析时出现的计算任务繁重、设备之间资源利用不均衡的问题,提出一种基于云控制的视频分析卸载方案.首先,针对客户端算力不足而无法完成视频分析任务的问题,使用一种视频卸载框架,将部分视频分析任务切块卸载至云服务器处理;其次,针对服务器与多客户端之间的算力资源竞争问题,提出一种阶段优化卸载算法,平衡设备之间负荷,提高资源利用率;最后,针对不同点位的客户端需求不同的问题,在算法中加入精度和能耗偏好,满足不同客户端的需求.与其他卸载方案对比的实验表明,所提出方案能够更好地对视频分析任务进行合理分配,提高系统收益,并通过扩展实验验证所提出系统的扩展能力.     

A video streaming application for urban traffic management

Urban traffic control systems have based their technological infrastructure both on advanced analog close-circuit television systems (CCTV) and point-to-point links, providing difficult-to-scale and very expensive systems. The main goal of an urban traffic monitoring system is to capture, send, play and distribute video information from the streets of a certain city to a management centre where it is processed by different services. Current digitalization process of video networks, and the research carried out in the field of streaming media, has led vendors to present proprietary hardware and software solutions resulting in a strong dependency by their customers. This work presents an open urban traffic control system based in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) philosophy for hardware and software components, as well as open source and standardized protocols. The existence of open standards for video encoding and protocols for streaming media transmission over IP networks has led to the proposal of such a system. The proposed system is a suitable solution in terms of scalability, cost, interoperability and performance for traffic control systems. Furthermore, its architecture can be easily adapted to other video applications and tools like command and control, surveillance or security systems for military and civilian applications.     

Load balancing for video streaming services in hierarchical wireless networks

Wireless networks have focused on voice call services or wireless Internet access services. These days, the application service domain of wireless networks is rapidly expanding, and a wide variety of new services is emerging. Video streaming service is one of the most promising examples, evidenced by 3GPP’s MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service) and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). In this paper, we consider the provision of video streaming services in hierarchical wireless networks with multiple layers of cells. We particularly focus on optimal load balancing among the cells, aiming at the minimization of frame drop ratio for given video streaming sessions. From this objective function, we derive the optimal load balancing condition. Load balancing is essentially the issue of which users are assigned to which cell, i.e., the user assignment problem. In our user assignment algorithm, we compute thresholds to divide users into groups according to the user characteristics, and map the user groups to proper cells. The optimal load balancing condition can be reached by adaptively adjusting the threshold at run time. This process does not require prior knowledge about the system status, such as the system capacity or user traffic requests, which warrants the practicality of the proposed scheme. Via simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves optimal load balancing in various realistic environments.     

Unsupervised deep learning for real-time assessment of video streaming services

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Evaluating quality of experience in video streaming services requires a quality metric that works in real time and for a broad range of video types and network...     

异构无线网络中基于非正交多址的可伸缩视频多播机制

文中提出了异构无线网络下基于非正交多址的可伸缩视频多播的资源管理框架.该框架综合考虑了不同基站间的频谱切分、切片内多播组之间的频谱分配和多播组内的发射功率分配,目的是最大化多播组所有用户设备的整体视频质量.考虑到每个多播组请求视频的不同、不同的用户设备位置和小基站间的干扰,将联合资源管理问题转化为一个整数线性规划问题,并将该优化问题解耦为多播组内发射功率划分问题和基站间频谱切分与基站内多组频谱资源分配问题.前者通过多重循环求得了叠加编码每一层所需的最优发射功率,后者通过背包算法得到了最优的解.仿真结果表明,所提方案在频谱利用率和用户设备平均视频质量方面优于现有方案.     

Complexity of cloud-based transcoding platform for scalable and effective video streaming services

Nowadays, a fast network improves the quality of our daily life and we can enjoy a variety of services over the Internet. Different types of media streaming services have been proposed and utilized as the network speed is now sufficiently fast to deliver high-quality live streaming. Usually, different media streaming services deliver streaming data by using different protocols such as the real-time message protocol (RTMP), real-time streaming protocol (RTSP), and Windows media HTTP streaming protocol (WMSP). In this paper, we propose and implement a cloud-based scalable and cost-effective video streaming transcoding service platform to provide the service of changing real-time streaming protocols (RTMP/RTSP) and codecs (H.263/H.264). A transcoder dispatching problem (TDP) over the cloud platform is also defined, which attempts to serve all the transcoding requests by minimizing the cost of virtual machines. Further, a transcoder dispatching algorithm and an online transcoder dispatching algorithm are proposed for the TDP. These algorithms are implemented on the Amazon EC2 platform. Experimental results demonstrate that by renting different levels of virtual machines dynamically and intelligently, we can provide a scalable and cost-effective transcoding service for bridging heterogeneous streaming media.     

A dependable multisource streaming system for peer-to-peer -based video on demand services provisioning

In this article, we present the design, implementation, and analysis of a scalable VOD (Video On Demand) distribution architecture for IP networks. The focus of our work is on the underlying multisource streaming architecture upon which the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) -based VOD services provisioning system relies. While multipoint-to-point multisource streaming is the core building block for a distributed VOD services provisioning system, it also introduces new reliability challenges as the streaming failure probability increases with the number of sources in a session. A major contribution of our work is the design of a suite of distinct yet complementary reliability/failover mechanisms that can be leveraged to improve the dependability of multisource streaming, and the viability of P2P-based VOD systems in general. Our work shows that the reliability/failover mechanisms can be arranged, combined, and alternated in advanced adaptation policies in order to deal with different conditions exhibited by the network. Another contribution of our work consists of implementing and assessing the performance of the different reliability mechanisms and adaptation policies in a real prototype system. We evaluate both the accuracy of streaming problems diagnosis, and the efficiency of the reliability mechanisms, in two adaptation strategies: one responsive to loss variation, and the other responsive to delay variation.     

L-Shape advertising for mobile video streaming services: Less intrusive while still effective

Advertising is significant in video streaming services on mobile devices, as well as in other e-business services. Advertisement providers pay part or the entire service cost; hence, users enjoy services at a low price or free of charge. However, users perceive advertisements as clutter and avoid them. To reduce advertising avoidance and enhance advertising efficiency, various methods, such as raising advertising relevance, seeking advertisement permission, or changing advertisement position, are suggested. This study introduces L-Shape advertising, a new strategy suitable for mobile video streaming services, as it is less distractive and effective. We demonstrate the superiority of L-Shape advertising compared to popular advertising formats such as skippable and non-skippable advertisements. The study empirically tests how the proposed strategy performs and examines users’ cognitive processes applying eye-tracking technology. We found that L-Shape advertising is less distractive but still effective.     

Dynamic pricing with traffic engineering for adaptive video streaming over software-defined content delivery networking

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Multimedia content has become widespread in network traffic. The high volume of data and flexibility must be addressed to guarantee the quality of experience...     

面向视频流媒体的应用层多播技术研究 *

主要关注面向视频流媒体的应用层多播（ALM）技术的研究近况。首先总结了ALM的研究概况和分 类,重点研究了几个针对视频流媒体应用而提出的ALM协议和框架,讨论其中用到的一些前沿技术,分析这些 协议的优缺点,同时给出一些改进思路。最后展望了ALM视频流媒体技术的未来研究方向。     

Enhancing aggregate QoS for video streaming

The IETF's Differentiated Services architecture is designed to provide different types or levels of service for Internet traffic. One of its key features is that traffic flows are aggregated so that routers in the core network only need to distinguish a relatively small number of aggregate flows, even if those flows consist of hundreds or thousands of individual flows. However, network-level QoS differentiation may not satisfy the requirements of many QoS-sensitive applications such as live video streaming, where end-to-end delay and reliability must be guaranteed.

This paper investigates application-level service differentiation for MPEG video streaming in a Diff-Serv-aware MPLS network infrastructure, along with routing support at the network layer. Based on the fact that MPEG video has become one of the most popular formats for Internet (wired and wireless) users, our approach enhances aggregate QoS for video streaming by employing existing application-level knowledge of the MPEG video structure; therefore it requires neither a new video compression algorithm nor additional bandwidth. Several MPEG video dispersion models are proposed and analyzed. Simulation results show that two such strategies are superior to the other tested. In addition, a new routing scheme is proposed to support searching the ‘best’ paths for efficient multi-path video streaming. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our approaches improve the aggregate QoS of MPEG video streams, as well as overall network efficiency.     

Scalable video transmission for the Internet

Information systems and distributed applications for the Internet show a growing demand for real-time audiovisual services. Support for those services within the Internet protocol layer will be widely available in the near future. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous structure of the Internet remains to be a great obstacle for establishing real-time video services. Scalable video codecs, generating bit-streams decodable at different rates, have been proposed to address the heterogeneity problem. In this article we present a scalable codec based on a spatio-temporal resolution pyramid combined with lattice vector quantization for efficient compression. With this approach additional lower bit-rate layers can be transmitted at the same overall bit-rate as needed by an H.263 single-layer transmission. The complexity of the codec is sufficiently low to allow software-only implementations of Internet video services. This is demonstrated on an Internet video server application.     

基于5/3运动补偿时间提升的可伸缩视频编码

运动补偿时间滤波是一种有效的可伸缩视频编码方案，采用5/3提升小波实现能进一步提高其编码性能。在给出了5/3运动补偿时间提升的计算公式之后，提出了将其实现的有限内存算法，避免了帧组带来的边界效应，也去掉了对视频序列长度的限制。为了提高低码率时5/3时间提升的性能，提出了运动矢量的压缩表示方法，使得真正编码的运动矢量总数不超过每个原始帧一个。针对不相连像素问题，根据像素的不同连接状态设计了不同的运动处理模式。实验结果表明，该方法的性能优于Haar提升滤波0.3dB~0.7 dB，在中高码率时与H.264/AVC也是可以比较的。     

面向5G车联网场景的移动任务动态卸载策略研究

由于车辆自身的高速移动性和资源有限性等特征,使得采用传统通信和计算手段的车联网场景无法满足用户日益增长的数据计算需求和体验质量需求。采用5G和边缘计算技术构建的新型车联网架构可以满足以上需求,但由于网络结构的变化,需设计适合新场景下的车辆任务通信和计算策略。针对5G车联网场景下的移动车辆任务动态卸载问题进行研究,提出了对应的动态任务分配策略和卸载调度低时延算法。车辆会根据提出的策略和算法将未完成的计算任务卸载到相应的 MEC 服务器或车辆上,并且计算结果将通过边缘服务器之间的联合通信或直接从被选择接受卸载任务的附近空闲车辆上直接返回给车主。仿真结果表明,所提出的策略和算法在优化卸载延迟方面具有良好的性能,并提高了用户体验质量。     

Real-time video transport optimization using streaming agent over 3G wireless networks

Feedback adaptation has been the basis for many media streaming schemes, whereby the media being sent is adapted in real time according to feedback information about the observed network state and application state. Central to the success of such adaptive schemes, the feedback must: 1) arrive in a timely manner and 2) carry enough information to effect useful adaptation. In this paper, we examine the use of feedback adaptation for media streaming in 3G wireless networks, where the media servers are located in wired networks while the clients are wireless. We argue that end-to-end feedback adaptation using only information provided by 3G standards is neither timely nor contain enough information for media adaptation at the server. We first show how the introduction of a streaming agent (SA) at the junction of the wired and wireless network can be used to provide useful information in a timely manner for media adaptation. We then show how optimization algorithms can be designed to take advantage of SA feedbacks to improve performance. The improvement of SA feedbacks in peak signal-to-noise ratio is significant over nonagent-based systems.     

基于NOMA的5G超密网计算迁移与资源分配策略

针对5G超密网中移动设备计算能力不足、频谱资源有限的问题,提出了一种基于非正交多址接入（NOMA）的计算迁移与带宽分配策略。首先,对系统模型进行了分析,并在此基础上以最小化设备计算代价为目标对所研究的问题进行形式化定义;然后,将该问题分解成设备的计算迁移、系统的带宽分配和设备的分组匹配三个子问题,并利用模拟退火、内点法和贪心算法对这三个子问题进行求解;最后,通过联合优化算法对上述子问题进行交替性迭代求解,最终获得最优计算迁移和资源分配策略。仿真结果表明,所提出的联合优化策略不但优于传统的正交多址接入（OMA）方式,而且能获得比平均分配带宽的NOMA技术更低的设备计算代价。     

适合视频传输的多接口多信道AOMDV路由研究

为了提高在Ad Hoc上实时视频传输质量,改进现有的信道切换算法并应用到AOMDV(Ad-hoc on-demandMultipath distance vector)协议,得到一个新的路由协议:MIMC-AOMDV(multi interface multi channel AOMDV)路由协议;针对影响视频传输质量的网络性能指标,进一步采用区分视频服务的时延QoS约束和跨层的链路质量度量改进MIMC-AOMDV路由协议得到新协议:QMMIMC-AOMDV(quality metric MIMC-AOMDV);通过扩展实验平台并用仿真实验验证了所提出的改进思想的可行性和有效性。实验结果表明,所提出的QMMIMC-AOMDV协议能有效降低帧时延,提高帧可解码率和峰值信噪比(peak signal to noise ratio,PSNR),更适合于实时视频流的传输。     

Wireless CDN video streaming architecture for IPTV

Wireless IPTV (Internet Protocol TeleVision) aims to make the traditional IPTV and related services available to users anywhere, anytime, on any device, and through any network. Mobile streaming TV is one of the alternatives to deploy such a system; others are DVB-H or MediaFLO. In this paper we propose an alternative CDN-based architecture to distribute contents to different access networks, in order to create a triple screen platform. The core elements of the system are the video streamers, acting as surrogates of the mobile CDN-based architecture, installed in the access networks (including mobile), and the transcoding servers in the premises of the content providers. The paper focused on the wireless part of the system, analyzing the architecture and performance results related with the video coding and the efficiency obtained due to the placement of the streaming servers. The system has been deployed by a Spanish media company for its use with different Telcos, ISPs and media companies.