Optimized Adaptive Streaming Representations based on System Dynamics

Adaptive streaming addresses the increasing and heterogenous demand of multimedia content over the Internet by offering several encoded versions for each video sequence. Each version (or representation) has a different resolution and bit rate, aimed at a specific set of users, like TV or mobile phone clients. While most existing works on adaptive streaming deal with effective playout-control strategies at the client side, we take in this paper a providers' perspective and propose solutions to improve user satisfaction by optimizing the encoding rates of the video sequences. We formulate an integer linear program that maximizes users' average satisfaction, taking into account the network dynamics, the video content information, and the user population characteristics. The solution of the optimization is a set of encoding parameters that permit to create different streams to robustly satisfy users' requests over time. We simulate multiple adaptive streaming sessions characterized by realistic network connections models, where the proposed solution outperforms commonly used vendor recommendations, in terms of user satisfaction but also in terms of fairness and outage probability. The simulation results further show that video content information as well as network constraints and users' statistics play a crucial role in selecting proper encoding parameters to provide fairness a mong users and to reduce network resource usage. We finally propose a few practical guidelines that can be used to choose the encoding parameters based on the user base characteristics, the network capacity and the type of video content

Traffic Profiling for Mobile Video Streaming

This paper describes a novel system that provides key parameters of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) sessions to the lower layers of the protocol stack. A non-intrusive traffic profiling solution is proposed that observes packet flows at the transmit queue of base stations, edge-routers, or gateways. By analyzing IP flows in real time, the presented scheme identifies different phases of an HAS session and estimates important application-layer parameters, such as play-back buffer state and video encoding rate. The introduced estimators only use IP-layer information, do not require standardization and work even with traffic that is encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS). Experimental results for a popular video streaming service clearly verify the high accuracy of the proposed solution. Traffic profiling, thus, provides a valuable alternative to cross-layer signaling and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in order to perform efficient network optimization for video streaming.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figures. Accepted for publication in the proceedings of IEEE ICC'1

eCMT-SCTP: Improving Performance of Multipath SCTP with Erasure Coding Over Lossy Links

Performance of transport protocols on lossy links is a well-researched topic, however there are only a few proposals making use of the opportunities of erasure coding within the multipath transport protocol context. In this paper, we investigate performance improvements of multipath CMT-SCTP with the novel integration of the on-the-fly erasure code within congestion control and reliability mechanisms. Our contributions include: integration of transport protocol and erasure codes with regards to congestion control; proposal for a variable retransmission delay parameter (aRTX) adjustment; performance evaluation of CMT-SCTP with erasure coding with simulations. We have implemented the explicit congestion notification (ECN) and erasure coding schemes in NS-2, evaluated and demonstrated results of improvement both for application goodput and decline of spurious retransmission. Our results show that we can achieve from 10% to 80% improvements in goodput under lossy network conditions without a significant penalty and minimal overhead due to the encoding-decoding process

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