On the impact of redirection on HTTP adaptive streaming services in federated CDNs

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) refers to a set of novel streaming services that allow clients to adapt video quality based on current network conditions. Their use of existing HTTP delivery infrastructure makes them perfectly suited for deployment on existing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Nevertheless, this leads to some new challenges, related to the distribution of content across servers and the latency caused by request redirection. The federation or interconnection of CDNs proliferates these problems, as it allows content to be distributed across networks and increases the number of redirects. This paper focuses on the second problem, assessing the impact of redirection on the Quality of Experience of HAS in CDN interconnection scenarios. Additionally, several novel inter-CDN request routing policies are proposed that aim to reduce the number of redirects. Our results indicate that redirection latency significantly impacts performance of HAS and more intelligent routing mechanisms are capable of solving this problem

MADServer: An Architecture for Opportunistic Mobile Advanced Delivery

Rapid increases in cellular data traffic demand creative alternative delivery vectors for data. Despite the conceptual attractiveness of mobile data offloading, no concrete web server architectures integrate intelligent offloading in a production-ready and easily deployable manner without relying on vast infrastructural changes to carriers’ networks. Delay-tolerant networking technology offers the means to do just this. We introduce MADServer, a novel DTN-based architecture for mobile data offloading that splits web con- tent among multiple independent delivery vectors based on user and data context. It enables intelligent data offload- ing, caching, and querying solutions which can be incorporated in a manner that still satisfies user expectations for timely delivery. At the same time, it allows for users who have poor or expensive connections to the cellular network to leverage multi-hop opportunistic routing to send and receive data. We also present a preliminary implementation of MADServer and provide real-world performance evaluations

Design and analysis of a beacon-less routing protocol for large volume content dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Largevolumecontentdisseminationispursuedbythegrowingnumberofhighquality applications for Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks(VANETs), e.g., the live road surveillance service and the video-based overtaking assistant service. For the highly dynamical vehicular network topology, beacon-less routing protocols have been proven to be efficient in achieving a balance between the system performance and the control overhead. However, to the authors’ best knowledge, the routing design for large volume content has not been well considered in the previous work, which will introduce new challenges, e.g., the enhanced connectivity requirement for a radio link. In this paper, a link Lifetime-aware Beacon-less Routing Protocol (LBRP) is designed for large volume content delivery in VANETs. Each vehicle makes the forwarding decision based on the message header information and its current state, including the speed and position information. A semi-Markov process analytical model is proposed to evaluate the expected delay in constructing one routing path for LBRP. Simulations show that the proposed LBRP scheme outperforms the traditional dissemination protocols in providing a low end-to-end delay. The analytical model is shown to exhibit a good match on the delay estimation with Monte Carlo simulations, as well

On the merits of SVC-based HTTP adaptive streaming

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is quickly becoming the dominant type of video streaming in Over-The-Top multimedia services. HAS content is temporally segmented and each segment is offered in different video qualities to the client. It enables a video client to dynamically adapt the consumed video quality to match with the capabilities of the network and/or the client's device. As such, the use of HAS allows a service provider to offer video streaming over heterogeneous networks and to heterogeneous devices. Traditionally, the H. 264/AVC video codec is used for encoding the HAS content: for each offered video quality, a separate AVC video file is encoded. Obviously, this leads to a considerable storage redundancy at the video server as each video is available in a multitude of qualities. The recent Scalable Video Codec (SVC) extension of H. 264/AVC allows encoding a video into different quality layers: by dowloading one or more additional layers, the video quality can be improved. While this leads to an immediate reduction of required storage at the video server, the impact of using SVC-based HAS on the network and perceived quality by the user are less obvious. In this article, we characterize the performance of AVC- and SVC-based HAS in terms of perceived video quality, network load and client characteristics, with the goal of identifying advantages and disadvantages of both options

An autonomic delivery framework for HTTP adaptive streaming in multicast-enabled multimedia access networks

The consumption of multimedia services over HTTP-based delivery mechanisms has recently gained popularity due to their increased flexibility and reliability. Traditional broadcast TV channels are now offered over the Internet, in order to support Live TV for a broad range of consumer devices. Moreover, service providers can greatly benefit from offering external live content (e. g., YouTube, Hulu) in a managed way. Recently, HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) techniques have been proposed in which video clients dynamically adapt their requested video quality level based on the current network and device state. Unlike linear TV, traditional HTTP- and HAS-based video streaming services depend on unicast sessions, leading to a network traffic load proportional to the number of multimedia consumers. In this paper we propose a novel HAS-based video delivery architecture, which features intelligent multicasting and caching in order to decrease the required bandwidth considerably in a Live TV scenario. Furthermore we discuss the autonomic selection of multicasted content to support Video on Demand (VoD) sessions. Experiments were conducted on a large scale and realistic emulation environment and compared with a traditional HAS-based media delivery setup using only unicast connections