Efficient and Effective Schemes for Streaming Media Delivery

The rapid expansion of the Internet and the increasingly wide deployment of wireless networks provide opportunities to deliver streaming media content to users at anywhere, anytime. To ensure good user experience, it is important to battle adversary effects, such as delay, loss and jitter. In this thesis, we first study efficient loss recovery schemes, which require pure XOR operations. In particular, we propose a novel scheme capable of recovering up to 3 packet losses, and it has the lowest complexity among all known schemes. We also propose an efficient algorithm for array codes decoding, which achieves significant throughput gain and energy savings over conventional codes. We believe these schemes are applicable to streaming applications, especially in wireless environments. We then study quality adaptation schemes for client buffer management. Our control-theoretic approach results in an efficient online rate control algorithm with analytically tractable performance. Extensive experimental results show that three goals are achieved: fast startup, continuous playback in the face of severe congestion, and maximal quality and smoothness over the entire streaming session. The scheme is later extended to streaming with limited quality levels, which is then directly applicable to existing systems

Skalierbare Videocodierung mittels Teilbandzerlegung

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Packet scheduling strategies for emerging service models in the internet

Traditional as well as emerging new Internet applications such as video-conferencing and live multimedia broadcasts from Internet TV stations will rely on scheduling algorithms in switches and routers to meet a diversity of service requirements desired from the network. This dissertation focuses on four categories of service requirements that cover the vast majority of current as well as emerging new applications: best-effort service, guaranteed service (delay and bandwidth), controlled load service, and soft real-time service. For each of these service types, we develop novel packet scheduling strategies that achieve better performance and better fairness than existing strategies.Best-effort and guaranteed services: A fair packet scheduler designed for best- effort service can also be employed to achieve bandwidth and delay guarantees. This dissertation proposes a novel fair scheduling algorithm, called Greedy Fair Queueing (GrFQ),that explicitly incorporates the goal of achieving better fairness into the actions of the scheduler. A simplified version of the scheduler is also proposed for easier deployment in real networks. Controlled load service: This dissertation analyzes and defines requirements on packet schedulers serving traffic that request the controlled load service (part of the Integrated Services architecture). We then propose a novel scheduler, called the CL(®) scheduler, which provides service differentiation for aggregated traffic for controlled load service. The proposed scheduler satisfies the defined requirements with a very low processing complexity and without requiring per-flow management. Soft real-time service: We formally define the service requirements of soft real-time applications which have delay constraints but which can tolerate some packet losses. Two novel schedulers of different levels of complexity are proposed. These schedulers achieve better performance (lower overall loss rates) and better fairness than previously known schedulers.We adapt a metric used widely in economics, called the Gini index, to our purpose of evaluating the fairness achieved by our schedulers under real traffic conditions. The Gini index captures the instantaneous fairness achieved at most instants of time as opposed to previously used measures of fairness in the networking literature. Using real video, audio and gateway traffic traces, we show that the proposed schedulers achieve better performance and fairness characteristics than other known schedulers.Ph.D., Electrical Engineering -- Drexel University, 200

Scalable Video Transmission for the Internet

Information systems and distributed applications for the Internet show a growing demand for real-time audiovisual services. Support for those services within the Internet protocol layer will be widely available in the near future. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous structure of the Internet remains to be a great obstacle for establishing real-time video services. Scalable video codecs, generating bit-streams decodable at different rates, have been proposed to address the heterogeneity problem. In this paper we present a scalable codec based on a spatio-temporal resolution pyramid combined with lattice vector quantization for efficient compression. With this approach additionallower bitrate layers can be transmitted at the same overall bitrate as needed by an H.263 single-layer transmission. The complexity of the codec is sufficiently low to allow software-only implementations of Internet video services. This is demonstrated on the example of an implemented video server application. I. Int..