Application-Aware Network Design Using Software Defined Networking for Application Performance Optimization for Big Data and Video Streaming

Title from PDF of title page viewed October 30, 2017Dissertation advisor: Deep MedhiVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 122-135)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2017This dissertation investigates improvement in application performance. For applications, we consider two classes: Hadoop MapReduce and video streaming. The Hadoop MapReduce (M/R) framework has become the de facto standard for Big Data analytics. However, the lack of network-awareness of the default MapReduce resource manager in a traditional IP network can cause unbalanced job scheduling and network bottlenecks; such factors can eventually lead to an increase in the Hadoop MapReduce job completion time. Dynamic Video streaming over the HTTP (MPEG-DASH) is becoming the defacto dominating transport for today’s video applications. It has been implemented in today’s major media carriers such as Youtube and Netflix. It enables new video applications to fully utilize the existing physical IP network infrastructure. For new 3D immersive medias such as Virtual Reality and 360-degree videos are drawing great attentions from both consumers and researchers in recent years. One of the biggest challenges in streaming such 3D media is the high band width demands and video quality. A new Tile-based video is introduced in both video codec and streaming layer to reduce the transferred media size. In this dissertation, we propose a Software-Defined Network (SDN) approach in an Application-Aware Network (AAN) platform. We first present an architecture for our approach and then show how this architecture can be applied to two aforementioned application areas. Our approach provides both underlying network functions and application level forwarding logics for Hadoop MapReduce and video streaming. By incorporating a comprehensive view of the network, the SDN controller can optimize MapReduce work loads and DASH flows for videos by application-aware traffic reroute. We quantify the improvement for both Hadoop and MPEG-DASH in terms of job completion time and user’s quality of experience (QoE), respectively. Based on our experiments, we observed that our AAN platform for Hadoop MapReduce job optimization offer a significant improvement compared to a static, traditional IP network environment by reducing job run time by 16% to 300% for various MapReduce benchmark jobs. As for MPEG-DASH based video streaming, we can increase user perceived video bitrate by 100%.Introduction -- Research survey -- Proposed architecture -- AAN-SDN for Hadoop -- Study of User QoE Improvement for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) -- AAN-SDN For MPEG-DASH -- Conclusion -- Appendix A. Mininet Topology Source Code For DASH Setup -- Appendix B. Hadoop Installation Source Code -- Appendix C. Openvswitch Installation Source Code -- Appendix D. HiBench Installation Guid

Quality of experience-centric management of adaptive video streaming services : status and challenges

Video streaming applications currently dominate Internet traffic. Particularly, HTTP Adaptive Streaming ( HAS) has emerged as the dominant standard for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet, thanks to its capability of matching the video quality to the available network resources. In HAS, the video client is equipped with a heuristic that dynamically decides the most suitable quality to stream the content, based on information such as the perceived network bandwidth or the video player buffer status. The goal of this heuristic is to optimize the quality as perceived by the user, the so-called Quality of Experience (QoE). Despite the many advantages brought by the adaptive streaming principle, optimizing users' QoE is far from trivial. Current heuristics are still suboptimal when sudden bandwidth drops occur, especially in wireless environments, thus leading to freezes in the video playout, the main factor influencing users' QoE. This issue is aggravated in case of live events, where the player buffer has to be kept as small as possible in order to reduce the playout delay between the user and the live signal. In light of the above, in recent years, several works have been proposed with the aim of extending the classical purely client-based structure of adaptive video streaming, in order to fully optimize users' QoE. In this article, a survey is presented of research works on this topic together with a classification based on where the optimization takes place. This classification goes beyond client-based heuristics to investigate the usage of server-and network-assisted architectures and of new application and transport layer protocols. In addition, we outline the major challenges currently arising in the field of multimedia delivery, which are going to be of extreme relevance in future years

QoE management of multimedia streaming services in future networks : a tutorial and survey

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Video Caching, Analytics and Delivery at the Wireless Edge: A Survey and Future Directions

Future wireless networks will provide high bandwidth, low-latency, and ultra-reliable Internet connectivity to meet the requirements of different applications, ranging from mobile broadband to the Internet of Things. To this aim, mobile edge caching, computing, and communication (edge-C3) have emerged to bring network resources (i.e., bandwidth, storage, and computing) closer to end users. Edge-C3 allows improving the network resource utilization as well as the quality of experience (QoE) of end users. Recently, several video-oriented mobile applications (e.g., live content sharing, gaming, and augmented reality) have leveraged edge-C3 in diverse scenarios involving video streaming in both the downlink and the uplink. Hence, a large number of recent works have studied the implications of video analysis and streaming through edge-C3. This article presents an in-depth survey on video edge-C3 challenges and state-of-the-art solutions in next-generation wireless and mobile networks. Specifically, it includes: a tutorial on video streaming in mobile networks (e.g., video encoding and adaptive bitrate streaming); an overview of mobile network architectures, enabling technologies, and applications for video edge-C3; video edge computing and analytics in uplink scenarios (e.g., architectures, analytics, and applications); and video edge caching, computing and communication methods in downlink scenarios (e.g., collaborative, popularity-based, and context-aware). A new taxonomy for video edge-C3 is proposed and the major contributions of recent studies are first highlighted and then systematically compared. Finally, several open problems and key challenges for future research are outlined

QOE-AWARE CONTENT DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS FOR ADAPTIVE BITRATE VIDEO STREAMING

A prodigious increase in video streaming content along with a simultaneous rise in end system capabilities has led to the proliferation of adaptive bit rate video streaming users in the Internet. Today, video streaming services range from Video-on-Demand services like traditional IP TV to more recent technologies such as immersive 3D experiences for live sports events. In order to meet the demands of these services, the multimedia and networking research community continues to strive toward efficiently delivering high quality content across the Internet while also trying to minimize content storage and delivery costs. The introduction of flexible and adaptable technologies such as compute and storage clouds, Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networking continue to fuel content provider revenue. Today, content providers such as Google and Facebook build their own Software-Defined WANs to efficiently serve millions of users worldwide, while NetFlix partners with ISPs such as ATT (using OpenConnect) and cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 to serve their content and manage the delivery of several petabytes of high-quality video content for millions of subscribers at a global scale, respectively. In recent years, the unprecedented growth of video traffic in the Internet has seen several innovative systems such as Software Defined Networks and Information Centric Networks as well as inventive protocols such as QUIC, in an effort to keep up with the effects of this remarkable growth. While most existing systems continue to sub-optimally satisfy user requirements, future video streaming systems will require optimal management of storage and bandwidth resources that are several orders of magnitude larger than what is implemented today. Moreover, Quality-of-Experience metrics are becoming increasingly fine-grained in order to accurately quantify diverse content and consumer needs. In this dissertation, we design and investigate innovative adaptive bit rate video streaming systems and analyze the implications of recent technologies on traditional streaming approaches using real-world experimentation methods. We provide useful insights for current and future content distribution network administrators to tackle Quality-of-Experience dilemmas and serve high quality video content to several users at a global scale. In order to show how Quality-of-Experience can benefit from core network architectural modifications, we design and evaluate prototypes for video streaming in Information Centric Networks and Software-Defined Networks. We also present a real-world, in-depth analysis of adaptive bitrate video streaming over protocols such as QUIC and MPQUIC to show how end-to-end protocol innovation can contribute to substantial Quality-of-Experience benefits for adaptive bit rate video streaming systems. We investigate a cross-layer approach based on QUIC and observe that application layer-based information can be successfully used to determine transport layer parameters for ABR streaming applications