Network-aware video streaming for future media Internet

272 p

Provider-Controlled Bandwidth Management for HTTP-based Video Delivery

Over the past few years, a revolution in video delivery technology has taken place as mobile viewers and over-the-top (OTT) distribution paradigms have significantly changed the landscape of video delivery services. For decades, high quality video was only available in the home via linear television or physical media. Though Web-based services brought video to desktop and laptop computers, the dominance of proprietary delivery protocols and codecs inhibited research efforts. The recent emergence of HTTP adaptive streaming protocols has prompted a re-evaluation of legacy video delivery paradigms and introduced new questions as to the scalability and manageability of OTT video delivery. This dissertation addresses the question of how to enable for content and network service providers the ability to monitor and manage large numbers of HTTP adaptive streaming clients in an OTT environment. Our early work focused on demonstrating the viability of server-side pacing schemes to produce an HTTP-based streaming server. We also investigated the ability of client-side pacing schemes to work with both commodity HTTP servers and our HTTP streaming server. Continuing our client-side pacing research, we developed our own client-side data proxy architecture which was implemented on a variety of mobile devices and operating systems. We used the portable client architecture as a platform for investigating different rate adaptation schemes and algorithms. We then concentrated on evaluating the network impact of multiple adaptive bitrate clients competing for limited network resources, and developing schemes for enforcing fair access to network resources. The main contribution of this dissertation is the definition of segment-level client and network techniques for enforcing class of service (CoS) differentiation between OTT HTTP adaptive streaming clients. We developed a segment-level network proxy architecture which works transparently with adaptive bitrate clients through the use of segment replacement. We also defined a segment-level rate adaptation algorithm which uses download aborts to enforce CoS differentiation across distributed independent clients. The segment-level abstraction more accurately models application-network interactions and highlights the difference between segment-level and packet-level time scales. Our segment-level CoS enforcement techniques provide a foundation for creating scalable managed OTT video delivery services

Otimização de distribuição de conteúdos multimédia utilizando software-defined networking

The general use of Internet access and user equipments, such as smartphones, tablets and personal computers, is creating a new wave of video content consumption. In the past two decades, the Television broadcasting industry went through several evolutions and changes, evolving from analog to digital distribution, standard definition to high definition TV-channels, form the IPTV method of distribution to the latest set of technologies in content distribution, OTT. The IPTV technology introduced features that changed the passive role of the client to an active one, revolutionizing the way users consume TV content. Thus, the clients’ habits started to shape the services offered, leading to an anywhere and anytime offer of video content. OTT video delivery is a reflection of those habits, meeting the users’ desire, introducing several benefits discussed in this work over the previous technologies. However, the OTT type of delivery poses several challenges in terms of scalability and threatens the Telecommunications Operators business model, because OTT companies use the Telcos infrastructure for free. Consequently, Telecommunications Operators must prepare their infrastructure for future demand while offering new services to stay competitive. This dissertation aims to contribute with insights on what infrastructure changes a Telecommunications Operator must perform with a proposed bandwidth forecasting model. The results obtained from the forecast model paved the way to the proposed video content delivery method, which aims to improve users’ perceived Quality-of-Experience while optimizing load balancing decisions. The overall results show an improvement of users’ experience using the proposed method.A generalização do acesso à Internet e equipamentos pessoais como smartphones, tablets e computadores pessoais, está a criar uma nova onda de consumo de conteúdos multimedia. Nas ultimas duas décadas, a indústria de transmissão de Televisão atravessou várias evoluções e alterações, evoluindo da distribuição analógica para a digital, de canais de Televisão de definição padrão para alta definição, do método de distribuição IPTV, até ao último conjunto de tecnologias na distribuição de conteúdos, OTT. A tecnologia IPTV introduziu novas funcionalidades que mudaram o papel passivo do cliente para um papel activo, revolucionando a forma como os utilizadores consumem conteúdos televisivos. Assim, os hábitos dos clientes começaram a moldar os serviços oferecidos, levando à oferta de consumo de conteúdos em qualquer lugar e em qualquer altura. A entrega de vídeo OTT é um reflexo destes hábitos, indo ao encontro dos desejos dos utilizadores, que introduz inúmeras vantagens sobre outras tecnologias discutidas neste trabalho. No entanto, a entrega de conteúdos OTT cria diversos problemas de escalabilidade e ameaça o modelo de negócio das Operadoras de Telecomunicações, porque os fornecedores de serviço OTT usam a infraestrutura das mesmas sem quaisquer custos. Consequentemente, os Operadores de Telecomunicações devem preparar a sua infraestrutura para o consumo futuro ao mesmo tempo que oferecem novos serviços para se manterem competitivos. Esta dissertação visa contribuir com conhecimento sobre quais alterações uma Operadora de Telecomunicações deve executar com o modelo de previsão de largura de banda proposto. Os resultados obtidos abriram caminho para o método de entrega de conteúdos multimedia proposto, que visa ao melhoramento da qualidade de experiência do utilizador ao mesmo tempo que se optimiza o processo de balanceamento de carga. No geral os testes confirmam uma melhoria na qualidade de experiência do utilizador usando o método proposto.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Common media application format. Implementation and analysis

Internet streaming companies are an important business nowadays streaming all kinds of content to a growing audience. Although streaming over HTTP is standardized, there has been a lot of fragmentation in the market due to the lack of collaboration between streaming companies and devices, this affects the company operations because of how they manage all the technologies together. This fragmentation ends up degenerating into an inefficiency for the companies, from the technological, operational and productive point of view. To solve this issue, large companies in the streaming sector such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Netflix, along with other companies in the electronics world, like Samsung and LG, have agreed to design a new file format ready to break with the existing fragmentation. This new format is called Common Media Application Format (CMAF) and is expected to be widely accepted by all companies related to the world of streaming. This document presents a test carried out at RakutenTV studying the implementation of CMAF in the operations of the company and analyzing the its feasibility for a long-term run. Like many other companies, RakutenTV suffers from fragmentation which has a direct impact on the performance of the platform and the economic cost of maintaining it. With the new solution, it is expected to be able to offer a more efficient service and reduce the economic impact derived from the management and storage of current files

Serviços OTT TV: aspectos técnico-económicos

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesThe breadth of availability and variety of online video contents has helped to encourage a far more mobile experience, which has proved particularly popular among younger generations. Over The Top (OTT) services, particularly those on-demand video platforms, became more and more attractive to consumers when compared with the current main TV packages. This document describes how the video OTT Ecosystem works from a technical side. The description presented reaches both ends of the distribution chain: from how the video signals are acquired and processed, thru all the way to how they are delivered to the client, passing by the challenges and consequences that such services have on the network. The main objective of this dissertation is to understand the possibility to create in Portugal a new operator where the core business is video delivery using only OTT services.A amplitude e variedade de conteúdos disponíveis online têm ajudado a promover uma experiência cada ver mais móvel da televisão, serviço que se tem revelado particularmente popular entre os mais jovens. Serviços Over The Top (OTT), sobretudo aqueles disponíveis através de plataformas de video on-demand, têm-se tornado cada vez mais atraentes para os consumidores, em comparação com os atuais pacotes de televisão. Este documento descreve como funciona, do ponto de vista técnico, o ecossistema do vídeo sobre OTT. A descrição apresentada abrange ambas as extremidades da cadeia de distribuição: desde a forma como os sinais de vídeo são adquiridos e processados até ao modo como eles são entregues ao cliente, passando pelos problemas e consequências que tais serviços podem ter na rede. O principal objectivo deste trabalho é contribuir para compreender se é possível criar em Portugal um novo operador onde o core business seja a distribuição de vídeo utilizando apenas serviços OTT

Cloud media video encoding:review and challenges

In recent years, Internet traffic patterns have been changing. Most of the traffic demand by end users is multimedia, in particular, video streaming accounts for over 53%. This demand has led to improved network infrastructures and computing architectures to meet the challenges of delivering these multimedia services while maintaining an adequate quality of experience. Focusing on the preparation and adequacy of multimedia content for broadcasting, Cloud and Edge Computing infrastructures have been and will be crucial to offer high and ultra-high definition multimedia content in live, real-time, or video-on-demand scenarios. For these reasons, this review paper presents a detailed study of research papers related to encoding and transcoding techniques in cloud computing environments. It begins by discussing the evolution of streaming and the importance of the encoding process, with a focus on the latest streaming methods and codecs. Then, it examines the role of cloud systems in multimedia environments and provides details on the cloud infrastructure for media scenarios. After doing a systematic literature review, we have been able to find 49 valid papers that meet the requirements specified in the research questions. Each paper has been analyzed and classified according to several criteria, besides to inspect their relevance. To conclude this review, we have identified and elaborated on several challenges and open research issues associated with the development of video codecs optimized for diverse factors within both cloud and edge architectures. Additionally, we have discussed emerging challenges in designing new cloud/edge architectures aimed at more efficient delivery of media traffic. This involves investigating ways to improve the overall performance, reliability, and resource utilization of architectures that support the transmission of multimedia content over both cloud and edge computing environments ensuring a good quality of experience for the final user

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing for Video Streaming : Opportunities and Challenges

5G communication brings substantial improvements in the quality of service provided to various applications by achieving higher throughput and lower latency. However, interactive multimedia applications (e.g., ultra high definition video conferencing, 3D and multiview video streaming, crowd-sourced video streaming, cloud gaming, virtual and augmented reality) are becoming more ambitious with high volume and low latency video streams putting strict demands on the already congested networks. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that extends cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network i.e., at the base station level. To meet the latency requirements and avoid the end-to-end communication with remote cloud data centers, MEC allows to store and process video content (e.g., caching, transcoding, pre-processing) at the base stations. Both video on demand and live video streaming can utilize MEC to improve existing services and develop novel use cases, such as video analytics, and targeted advertisements. MEC is expected to reshape the future of video streaming by providing ultra-reliable and low latency streaming (e.g., in augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles), pervasive computing (e.g., in real-time video analytics), and blockchain-enabled architecture for secure live streaming. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent developments in MEC-enabled video streaming bringing unprecedented improvement to enable novel use cases. A detailed review of the state-of-the-art is presented covering novel caching schemes, optimal computation offloading, cooperative caching and offloading and the use of artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning) in MEC-assisted video streaming services.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

A Survey on Energy Consumption and Environmental Impact of Video Streaming

Climate change challenges require a notable decrease in worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across technology sectors. Digital technologies, especially video streaming, accounting for most Internet traffic, make no exception. Video streaming demand increases with remote working, multimedia communication services (e.g., WhatsApp, Skype), video streaming content (e.g., YouTube, Netflix), video resolution (4K/8K, 50 fps/60 fps), and multi-view video, making energy consumption and environmental footprint critical. This survey contributes to a better understanding of sustainable and efficient video streaming technologies by providing insights into the state-of-the-art and potential future directions for researchers, developers, and engineers, service providers, hosting platforms, and consumers. We widen this survey's focus on content provisioning and content consumption based on the observation that continuously active network equipment underneath video streaming consumes substantial energy independent of the transmitted data type. We propose a taxonomy of factors that affect the energy consumption in video streaming, such as encoding schemes, resource requirements, storage, content retrieval, decoding, and display. We identify notable weaknesses in video streaming that require further research for improved energy efficiency: (1) fixed bitrate ladders in HTTP live streaming; (2) inefficient hardware utilization of existing video players; (3) lack of comprehensive open energy measurement dataset covering various device types and coding parameters for reproducible research

A Software Cache Mechanism for Video Streaming Applying Popularity Index

วิทยานิพนธ์ (วศ.ม. (วิศวกรรมคอมพิวเตอร์))--มหาวิทยาลัยสงขลานครินทร์, 2562The present, there are growing demands for video streaming which are likely to increase as the users can easily access the Internet. Video file data is usually large and continuously sorted. It requires a lot of resources to process and communicate data between clients and the server. Cache is used to increase the efficiency and to reduce the time to read data from the storage which has a slow reading rate. This thesis introduces a cache system that exploits the video file popularity in the cache replacement policy in order to increase the efficiency of the cache system that serves video files via HTTP streaming, and also add the popularity attenuation process that decrease the popularity as the time passes by. It helps increase the cache efficiency by increasing the cache hit rate, reducing the latency of data retrieval from the backend storage, and as a result for reducing the process time for transmit from the HTTP server to the client.ในปัจจุบันมีความต้องการใช้งานข้อมูลไฟล์วิดีโอที่สูงขึ้นและมีแนวโน้มเพิ่มมากขึ้นเรื่อย ๆ เนื่องจากผู้ใช้สามารถเข้าถึงระบบเครือข่ายอินเตอร์เน็ตได้อย่างง่ายดาย ข้อมูลไฟล์วิดีโอ มักมีขนาดใหญ่และเป็นข้อมูลที่เรียงตัวอย่างต่อเนื่อง ต้องใช้ทรัพยากรมากในการประมวลผลและสื่อสารข้อมูลระหว่างไคลเอนต์และเซิร์ฟเวอร์ แคชถูกนำมาใช้ในการเพิ่มประสิทธิภาพและลดระยะเวลาในการอ่านข้อมูลจากแหล่งจัดเก็บที่มีอัตราการอ่านข้อมูลที่ต่ำ วิทยานิพนธ์นี้มุ่งนำ เสนอระบบแคชที่นำค่าความนิยมไฟล์วิดีโอ มาใช้ในนโยบายการแทนที่แคชเพื่อเพิ่มประสิทธิภาพให้กับแคชของระบบให้บริการไฟล์วิดีโอสตรีมมิ่งผ่านเอชทีทีพีโปรโตคอลและเพิ่มกระบวนการลดทอนค่าความนิยมตามเวลาที่เปลี่ยนแปลงไป เพื่อเพิ่มความสามารถของแคชโดยการเพิ่มอัตราการพบข้อมูลที่ต้องการในแคชและลดอัตรากรดึงข้อมูลจากแหล่งจัดเก็บข้อมูลเบื้องหลัง ทำให้ลดกระบวนการและระยะเวลาในการส่งข้อมูลจากเซิร์ฟเวอร์เอชทีทีพีไปยังไคลเอนต