A Comprehensive Analysis of Swarming-based Live Streaming to Leverage Client Heterogeneity

Due to missing IP multicast support on an Internet scale, over-the-top media streams are delivered with the help of overlays as used by content delivery networks and their peer-to-peer (P2P) extensions. In this context, mesh/pull-based swarming plays an important role either as pure streaming approach or in combination with tree/push mechanisms. However, the impact of realistic client populations with heterogeneous resources is not yet fully understood. In this technical report, we contribute to closing this gap by mathematically analysing the most basic scheduling mechanisms latest deadline first (LDF) and earliest deadline first (EDF) in a continuous time Markov chain framework and combining them into a simple, yet powerful, mixed strategy to leverage inherent differences in client resources. The main contributions are twofold: (1) a mathematical framework for swarming on random graphs is proposed with a focus on LDF and EDF strategies in heterogeneous scenarios; (2) a mixed strategy, named SchedMix, is proposed that leverages peer heterogeneity. The proposed strategy, SchedMix is shown to outperform the other two strategies using different abstractions: a mean-field theoretic analysis of buffer probabilities, simulations of a stochastic model on random graphs, and a full-stack implementation of a P2P streaming system.Comment: Technical report and supplementary material to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7497234

Utility Optimal Scheduling and Admission Control for Adaptive Video Streaming in Small Cell Networks

We consider the jointly optimal design of a transmission scheduling and admission control policy for adaptive video streaming over small cell networks. We formulate the problem as a dynamic network utility maximization and observe that it naturally decomposes into two subproblems: admission control and transmission scheduling. The resulting algorithms are simple and suitable for distributed implementation. The admission control decisions involve each user choosing the quality of the video chunk asked for download, based on the network congestion in its neighborhood. This form of admission control is compatible with the current video streaming technology based on the DASH protocol over TCP connections. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm under realistic assumptions for a small-cell network.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted and will be presented at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 201