5 research outputs found
Peer-to-peer live streaming for massively multiplayer online games
One of the most attractive features of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is the possibility for users to interact with a large number of other users in a variety of collaborative and competitive situations. Gamers within an MMOG typically become members of active communities with mutual interests, shared adventures, and common objectives. This demonstration presents a peer-to-peer live video system that enables MMOG players to stream screen-captured video of their game. Players can use the system to show their skills, share experience with friends, or coordinate missions in strategy games.European Commission's Seventh Framework Programm
Exploring the Emerging Domain of Research on Video Game Live Streaming in Web of Science: State of the Art, Changes and Trends
In recent years, interest in video game live streaming services has increased as a new communication instrument, social network, source of leisure, and entertainment platform for millions of users. The rise in this type of service has been accompanied by an increase in research on these platforms. As an emerging domain of research focused on this novel phenomenon takes shape, it is necessary to delve into its nature and antecedents. The main objective of this research is to provide a comprehensive reference that allows future analyses to be addressed with greater rigor and theoretical depth. In this work, we developed a meta-review of the literature supported by a bibliometric performance and network analysis (BPNA). We used the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) protocol to obtain a representative sample of 111 published documents since 2012 and indexed in the Web of Science. Additionally, we exposed the main research topics developed to date, which allowed us to detect future research challenges and trends. The findings revealed four specializations or subdomains: studies focused on the transmitter or streamer; the receiver or the audience; the channel or platform; and the transmission process. These four specializations add to the accumulated knowledge through the development of six core themes that emerge: motivations, behaviors, monetization of activities, quality of experience, use of social networks and media, and gender issues
Peer-to-peer live streaming for Massively Multiplayer Online Games
One of the most attractive features of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is the possibility for users to interact with a large number of other users in a variety of collaborative and competitive situations. Gamers within an MMOG typically become members of active communities with mutual interests, shared adventures, and common objectives. This demonstration presents a peer-to-peer live video system that enables MMOG players to stream screen-captured video of their game. Players can use the system to show their skills, share experience with friends, or coordinate missions in strategy games.European Commission's Seventh Framework Programm
Effective and Economical Content Delivery and Storage Strategies for Cloud Systems
Cloud computing has proved to be an effective infrastructure to host various applications and provide reliable and stable services. Content delivery and storage are two main services provided by the cloud. A high-performance cloud can reduce the cost of both cloud providers and customers, while providing high application performance to cloud clients. Thus, the performance of such cloud-based services is closely related to three issues. First, when delivering contents from the cloud to users or transferring contents between cloud datacenters, it is important to reduce the payment costs and transmission time. Second, when transferring contents between cloud datacenters, it is important to reduce the payment costs to the internet service providers (ISPs). Third, when storing contents in the datacenters, it is crucial to reduce the file read latency and power consumption of the datacenters. In this dissertation, we study how to effectively deliver and store contents on the cloud, with a focus on cloud gaming and video streaming services. In particular, we aim to address three problems. i) Cost-efficient cloud computing system to support thin-client Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG): how to achieve high Quality of Service (QoS) in cloud gaming and reduce the cloud bandwidth consumption; ii) Cost-efficient inter-datacenter video scheduling: how to reduce the bandwidth payment cost by fully utilizing link bandwidth when cloud providers transfer videos between datacenters; iii) Energy-efficient adaptive file replication: how to adapt to time-varying file popularities to achieve a good tradeoff between data availability and efficiency, as well as reduce the power consumption of the datacenters. In this dissertation, we propose methods to solve each of aforementioned challenges on the cloud. As a result, we build a cloud system that has a cost-efficient system to support cloud clients, an inter-datacenter video scheduling algorithm for video transmission on the cloud and an adaptive file replication algorithm for cloud storage system. As a result, the cloud system not only benefits the cloud providers in reducing the cloud cost, but also benefits the cloud customers in reducing their payment cost and improving high cloud application performance (i.e., user experience). Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on many testbeds, including PeerSim, PlanetLab, EC2 and a real-world cluster, which demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed methods. In our future work, we will further study how to further improve user experience in receiving contents and reduce the cost due to content transfer
Profiling Large-scale Live Video Streaming and Distributed Applications
PhDToday, distributed applications run at data centre and Internet scales, from intensive data
analysis, such as MapReduce; to the dynamic demands of a worldwide audience, such
as YouTube. The network is essential to these applications at both scales. To provide
adequate support, we must understand the full requirements of the applications, which
are revealed by the workloads. In this thesis, we study distributed system applications
at different scales to enrich this understanding.
Large-scale Internet applications have been studied for years, such as social networking
service (SNS), video on demand (VoD), and content delivery networks (CDN). An
emerging type of video broadcasting on the Internet featuring crowdsourced live video
streaming has garnered attention allowing platforms such as Twitch to attract over 1
million concurrent users globally. To better understand Twitch, we collected real-time
popularity data combined with metadata about the contents and found the broadcasters
rather than the content drives its popularity. Unlike YouTube and Netflix where content
can be cached, video streaming on Twitch is generated instantly and needs to be
delivered to users immediately to enable real-time interaction. Thus, we performed a
large-scale measurement of Twitchs content location revealing the global footprint of its
infrastructure as well as discovering the dynamic stream hosting and client redirection
strategies that helped Twitch serve millions of users at scale.
We next consider applications that run inside the data centre. Distributed computing
applications heavily rely on the network due to data transmission needs and the scheduling
of resources and tasks. One successful application, called Hadoop, has been widely
deployed for Big Data processing. However, little work has been devoted to understanding
its network. We found the Hadoop behaviour is limited by hardware resources and
processing jobs presented. Thus, after characterising the Hadoop traffic on our testbed
with a set of benchmark jobs, we built a simulator to reproduce Hadoops job traffic
With the simulator, users can investigate the connections between Hadoop traffic and
network performance without additional hardware cost. Different network components
can be added to investigate the performance, such as network topologies, queue policies,
and transport layer protocols.
In this thesis, we extended the knowledge of networking by investigated two widelyused
applications in the data centre and at Internet scale. We (i)studied the most
popular live video streaming platform Twitch as a new type of Internet-scale distributed
application revealing that broadcaster factors drive the popularity of such platform,
and we (ii)discovered the footprint of Twitch streaming infrastructure and the dynamic
stream hosting and client redirection strategies to provide an in-depth example of video
streaming delivery occurring at the Internet scale, also we (iii)investigated the traffic
generated by a distributed application by characterising the traffic of Hadoop under
various parameters, (iv)with such knowledge, we built a simulation tool so users can
efficiently investigate the performance of different network components under distributed
applicationQueen Mary University of Londo