Employing H.264 Coarse and Medium Grain Scalable Video to Optimize Video Playback over Passive Optical Networks

In this work, we propose the use of Coarse Grain Scalable (CGS) and Medium Grain Scalable (MGS) H.264/AVC video to optimize video playback on passive optical networks (PONs) by investigating network performance metrics such as data delay, video delay, and video delay jitter. Video playback is improved by sequentially dropping layers of scalable video. Dropping just a single CGS enhancement layer results in improvements of up to 57% for both data and video delay. However, video delay jitter benefits the most with an improvement ranging from 47% to 87%. Surprisingly, dropping subsequent CGS enhancement layers does not significantly improve the PONs performance. In order to remedy this effect, our focus switched to employing the H.264/AVC MGS video standard. Though video traffic delay is the primary object of optimization in this work, the proposed algorithm’s impacts on other network performance metrics such as data traffic delay and video traffic delay variance (jitter) are analyzed as well. Video playback is improved by employing an adaptive scalable video layer dropping algorithm which drops a progressively larger number of scalable video layers as network utilization increases as measured by the moving average of the video packet delay. The influence of the algorithm\u27s three parameters on its performance is investigated in detail, and the results of the optimized adaptive dropping algorithm are compared to baseline static dropping algorithm

Network coding meets multimedia: a review

While every network node only relays messages in a traditional communication system, the recent network coding (NC) paradigm proposes to implement simple in-network processing with packet combinations in the nodes. NC extends the concept of "encoding" a message beyond source coding (for compression) and channel coding (for protection against errors and losses). It has been shown to increase network throughput compared to traditional networks implementation, to reduce delay and to provide robustness to transmission errors and network dynamics. These features are so appealing for multimedia applications that they have spurred a large research effort towards the development of multimedia-specific NC techniques. This paper reviews the recent work in NC for multimedia applications and focuses on the techniques that fill the gap between NC theory and practical applications. It outlines the benefits of NC and presents the open challenges in this area. The paper initially focuses on multimedia-specific aspects of network coding, in particular delay, in-network error control, and mediaspecific error control. These aspects permit to handle varying network conditions as well as client heterogeneity, which are critical to the design and deployment of multimedia systems. After introducing these general concepts, the paper reviews in detail two applications that lend themselves naturally to NC via the cooperation and broadcast models, namely peer-to-peer multimedia streaming and wireless networkin

Bandwidth-efficient Video Streaming with Network Coding on Peer-to-Peer Networks

PhDOver the last decade, live video streaming applications have gained great popularity among users but put great pressure on video servers and the Internet. In order to satisfy the growing demands for live video streaming, Peer-to-Peer(P2P) has been developed to relieve the video servers of bandwidth bottlenecks and computational load. Furthermore, Network Coding (NC) has been proposed and proved as a significant breakthrough in information theory and coding theory. According to previous research, NC not only brings substantial improvements regarding throughput and delay in data transmission, but also provides innovative solutions for multiple issues related to resource allocation, such as the coupon-collection problem, allocation and scheduling procedure. However, the complex NC-driven P2P streaming network poses substantial challenges to the packet scheduling algorithm. This thesis focuses on the packet scheduling algorithm for video multicast in NC-driven P2P streaming network. It determines how upload bandwidth resources of peer nodes are allocated in different transmission scenarios to achieve a better Quality of Service(QoS). First, an optimized rate allocation algorithm is proposed for scalable video transmission (SVT) in the NC-based lossy streaming network. This algorithm is developed to achieve the tradeoffs between average video distortion and average bandwidth redundancy in each generation. It determines how senders allocate their upload bandwidth to different classes in scalable data so that the sum of the distortion and the weighted redundancy ratio can be minimized. Second, in the NC-based non-scalable video transmission system, the bandwidth ineffi- ciency which is caused by the asynchronization communication among peers is reduced. First, a scalable compensation model and an adaptive push algorithm are proposed to reduce the unrecoverable transmission caused by network loss and insufficient bandwidth resources. Then a centralized packet scheduling algorithm is proposed to reduce the unin- formative transmission caused by the asynchronized communication among sender nodes. Subsequently, we further propose a distributed packet scheduling algorithm, which adds a critical scalability property to the packet scheduling model. Third, the bandwidth resource scheduling for SVT is further studied. A novel multiple- generation scheduling algorithm is proposed to determine the quality classes that the receiver node can subscribe to so that the overall perceived video quality can be maxi- mized. A single generation scheduling algorithm for SVT is also proposed to provide a faster and easier solution to the video quality maximization function. Thorough theoretical analysis is conducted in the development of all proposed algorithms, and their performance is evaluated via comprehensive simulations. We have demon- strated, by adjusting the conventional transmission model and involving new packet scheduling models, the overall QoS and bandwidth efficiency are dramatically improved. In non-scalable video streaming system, the maximum video quality gain can be around 5dB compared with the random push method, and the overall uninformative transmiss- sion ratio are reduced to 1% - 2%. In scalable video streaming system, the maximum video quality gain can be around 7dB, and the overall uninformative transmission ratio are reduced to 2% - 3%

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Advanced solutions for quality-oriented multimedia broadcasting

Multimedia content is increasingly being delivered via different types of networks to viewers in a variety of locations and contexts using a variety of devices. The ubiquitous nature of multimedia services comes at a cost, however. The successful delivery of multimedia services will require overcoming numerous technological challenges many of which have a direct effect on the quality of the multimedia experience. For example, due to dynamically changing requirements and networking conditions, the delivery of multimedia content has traditionally adopted a best effort approach. However, this approach has often led to the end-user perceived quality of multimedia-based services being negatively affected. Yet the quality of multimedia content is a vital issue for the continued acceptance and proliferation of these services. Indeed, end-users are becoming increasingly quality-aware in their expectations of multimedia experience and demand an ever-widening spectrum of rich multimedia-based services. As a consequence, there is a continuous and extensive research effort, by both industry and academia, to find solutions for improving the quality of multimedia content delivered to the users; as well, international standards bodies, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), are renewing their effort on the standardization of multimedia technologies. There are very different directions in which research has attempted to find solutions in order to improve the quality of the rich media content delivered over various network types. It is in this context that this special issue on broadcast multimedia quality of the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting illustrates some of these avenues and presents some of the most significant research results obtained by various teams of researchers from many countries. This special issue provides an example, albeit inevitably limited, of the richness and breath of the current research on multimedia broadcasting services. The research i- - ssues addressed in this special issue include, among others, factors that influence user perceived quality, encoding-related quality assessment and control, transmission and coverage-based solutions and objective quality measurements

Multiple-Tree Push-based Overlay Streaming

Multiple-Tree Overlay Streaming has attracted a great amount of attention from researchers in the past years. Multiple-tree streaming is a promising alternative to single-tree streaming in terms of node dynamics and load balancing, among others, which in turn addresses the perceived video quality by the streaming user on node dynamics or when heterogeneous nodes join the network. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the different aproaches and techniques used in this research area. In this paper we identify node-disjointness as the property most approaches aim to achieve. We also present an alternative technique which does not try to achieve this but does local optimizations aiming global optimizations. Thus, we identify this property as not being absolute necessary for creating robust and heterogeneous multi-tree overlays. We identify two main design goals: robustness and support for heterogeneity, and classify existing approaches into these categories as their main focus

Optimized algorithms for multimedia streaming

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH