Analysis and implementation of the Large Scale Video-on-Demand System

Next Generation Network (NGN) provides multimedia services over broadband based networks, which supports high definition TV (HDTV), and DVD quality video-on-demand content. The video services are thus seen as merging mainly three areas such as computing, communication, and broadcasting. It has numerous advantages and more exploration for the large-scale deployment of video-on-demand system is still needed. This is due to its economic and design constraints. It's need significant initial investments for full service provision. This paper presents different estimation for the different topologies and it require efficient planning for a VOD system network. The methodology investigates the network bandwidth requirements of a VOD system based on centralized servers, and distributed local proxies. Network traffic models are developed to evaluate the VOD system's operational bandwidth requirements for these two network architectures. This paper present an efficient estimation of the of the bandwidth requirement for the different architectures.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Towards SVC-based adaptive streaming in information centric networks

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming services. In HAS, each video is segmented and stored in different qualities. The client can dynamically select the most appropriate quality level to download, allowing it to adapt to varying network conditions. As the Internet was not designed to deliver such applications, optimal support for multimedia delivery is still missing. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a recently proposed disruptive architecture that could solve this issue, where the focus is given to the content rather than to end-to-end connectivity. Due to the bandwidth unpredictability typical of ICN, standard AVC-based HAS performs quality selection sub-optimally, thus leading to a poor Quality of Experience (QoE). In this article, we propose to overcome this inefficiency by using Scalable Video Coding (SVC) instead. We individuate the main advantages of SVC-based HAS over ICN and outline, both theoretically and via simulation, the research challenges to be addressed to optimize the delivered QoE

An Adaptive Mechanism for Optimal Content Download in Wireless Networks

This paper presents an adaptive mechanism for improving the content download in wireless environments. The solution is based on the use of the file delivery over unidirectional transport (FLUTE) protocol in multicast networks, which reduce considerably the bandwidth when there are many users interested in the same contents. Specifically, the system proposed reduces the average download time of clients within the coverage area, thus improving the Quality of Experience. To that extent, clients send periodically feedback messages to the server reporting the losses they are experiencing. With this information, the server decides which is the optimum application layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) code rate that minimizes the average download time, taking into account the channel bandwidth, and starts sending data with that code rate. The system proposed is evaluated in various scenarios, considering different distributions of losses in the coverage area. Results show that the adaptive solution proposed is very suitable in wireless networks with limited bandwidth.This work is supported in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Government of Spain under project COMINN (IPT-2012-0883-430000). The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Wenwu Zhu.De Fez Lava, I.; Guerri Cebollada, JC. (2014). An Adaptive Mechanism for Optimal Content Download in Wireless Networks. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. 16(4):1140-1155. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2014.2307155S1140115516

Hybrid FLUTE/DASH video delivery over mobile wireless networks

This paper describes how FLUTE (File Delivery over Unidirectional Transport) and DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) can be used to provide mobile video streaming services over broadcast wireless networks. FLUTE is a multicast protocol for multimedia file download. In this proposal, the protocol is adapted to provide video streaming services in crowded environments. Thus, video is delivered over a single connection to all viewers, reducing the traffic in the network. FLUTE incorporates an AL-FEC (Application Layered Forward Error Correction) mechanism in order to improve the reliability of the broadcast communication channel. For streaming applications, AL-FEC improves the relationship between the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the received video and the bandwidth allocated to the broadcast connection. The AL-FEC hereby presented applies simple unequal error protection schemes to favor the download of key frames. Furthermore, the proposal is based on the same video segmentation mechanism as DASH and therefore, clients can connect to a DASH repository to repair errors in the segments. This paper shows that FLUTE and DASH can be seamlessly integrated into a hybrid broadcast/unicast streaming technology, providing flexibility to trade off PSNR and bandwidth depending on the conditions of the mobile network.This work was supported by the 11012 ICARE (Innovative Cloud Architecture for Real Entertainment) project within the ITEA 2 Call 6 Program of the European Union.Belda Ortega, R.; De Fez Lava, I.; Fraile Gil, F.; Arce Vila, P.; Guerri Cebollada, JC. (2014). Hybrid FLUTE/DASH video delivery over mobile wireless networks. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. 25(11):1070-1082. doi:10.1002/ett.2804S107010822511ETSI TS 126 346 v11.3.0. Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS); LTE; Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS); Protocols and Codecs 2013Lecompte, D., & Gabin, F. (2012). Evolved multimedia broadcast/multicast service (eMBMS) in LTE-advanced: overview and Rel-11 enhancements. IEEE Communications Magazine, 50(11), 68-74. doi:10.1109/mcom.2012.6353684Stockhammer T Luby MG DASH in mobile networks and services. Presented at IEEE Visual Communications and Image Processing (VCIP) , 2012Seeling, P., & Reisslein, M. (2012). Video Transport Evaluation With H.264 Video Traces. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 14(4), 1142-1165. doi:10.1109/surv.2011.082911.00067Zhao, S., Tuninetti, D., Ansari, R., & Schonfeld, D. (2012). Multiple description coding over multiple correlated erasure channels. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 23(6), 522-536. doi:10.1002/ett.2507Lin, C.-H., Wang, Y.-C., Shieh, C.-K., & Hwang, W.-S. (2012). An unequal error protection mechanism for video streaming over IEEE 802.11e WLANs. Computer Networks, 56(11), 2590-2599. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2012.04.004Paila T Walsh R Luby M Roca V Lehtonen R FLUTE - file delivery over unidirectional transport. 2012Luby M Watson M Vicisano L Asynchronous layered coding (ALC) protocol instantiation. 2010Ameigeiras, P., Ramos-Munoz, J. J., Navarro-Ortiz, J., & Lopez-Soler, J. M. (2012). Analysis and modelling of YouTube traffic. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 23(4), 360-377. doi:10.1002/ett.2546ISO/IEC 23009-1. Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) - Part 1: media presentation description and segment formats 2012De Fez, I., Fraile, F., Belda, R., & Guerri, J. C. (2012). Analysis and Evaluation of Adaptive LDPC AL-FEC Codes for Content Download Services. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 14(3), 641-650. doi:10.1109/tmm.2012.2190392Jenkac, H., Stockhammer, T., & Wen Xu. (2006). Asynchronous and reliable on-demand media broadcast. IEEE Network, 20(2), 14-20. doi:10.1109/mnet.2006.1607891Neumann C Roca V Scalable video streaming over ALC (SVSoA): a solution for the large scale multicast distribution of videos. Presented at 1st Int. Workshop on SMDI , 2004Lederer S Müller C Timmerer C Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP dataset Proc. of the ACM Conference on Multimedia Systems (MMSys) 2012 89 94Blender Foundation webpage http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/Bai, H., & Atiquzzaman, M. (2003). Error modeling schemes for fading channels in wireless communications: A survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 5(2), 2-9. doi:10.1109/comst.2003.5341334Ohm, J.-R. (2004). Multimedia Communication Technology. Signals and Communication Technology. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-18750-

Minimizing the impact of delay on live SVC-based HTTP adaptive streaming services

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is becoming the de-facto standard for Over-The-Top video streaming services. Video content is temporally split into segments which are offered at multiple qualities to the clients. These clients autonomously select the quality layer matching the current state of the network through a quality selection heuristic. Recently, academia and industry have begun evaluating the feasibility of adopting layered video coding for HAS. Instead of downloading one file for a certain quality level, scalable video streaming requires downloading several interdependent layers to obtain the same quality. This implies that the base layer is always downloaded and is available for playout, even when throughput fluctuates and enhancement layers can not be downloaded in time. This layered video approach can help in providing better service quality assurance for video streaming. However, adopting scalable video coding for HAS also leads to other issues, since requesting multiple files over HTTP leads to an increased impact of the end-to-end delay and thus on the service provided to the client. This is even worse in a Live TV scenario where the drift on the live signal should be minimized, requiring smaller segment and buffer sizes. In this paper, we characterize the impact of delay on several measurement-based heuristics. Furthermore, we propose several ways to overcome the end-to-end delay issues, such as parallel and pipelined downloading of segment layers, to provide a higher quality for the video service

Peer-to-peer stream merging for stored multimedia

In recent years, with the fast development of resource capability of both the Internet and personal computers, multimedia applications like video-on-demand (VOD) streaming have gained dramatic growth and been shown to be potential killer applications in the current and next-generation Internet. Scalable deployment of these applications has become a hot problem area due to the potentially high server and network bandwidth required in these systems.The conventional approach in a VOD streaming system dedicates a media stream for each client request, which is not scalable in a wide-area delivery system serving potentially very large numbers of clients. Recently, various efficient delivery techniques have been proposed to improve the scalability of VOD delivery systems. One approach is to use a scalable delivery protocol based on multicast, such as periodic broadcast or stream merging. These protocols have been mostly developed for single-server based systems and attempt to have each media stream serve as many clients as possible, so as to minimize the required server and network bandwidth. However, the performance improvements possible with techniques that deliver all streams from a single server are limited, especially regarding the required network bandwidth. Another approach is based on proxy caching and content replication, such as in content delivery networks (CDN). Although this approach is able to effectively distribute load across multiple CDN servers, the cost of this approach may be high.With the focus on further improving the system efficiency regarding the server and network bandwidth requirement, a new scalable streaming protocol is developed in this work. It adapts a previously proposed technique called hierarchical multicast stream merging (HMSM) to use a peer-to-peer delivery approach. To be more efficient in media delivery, the conventional early merging policy associated with HMSM is extended to be compatible with the peer-to-peer environment, and various peer selection policies are designed for initiation of media streams. The impact of limited peer resource capability is also studied in this work. In the performance study, a number of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new protocol and various design policies, and promising results are reported

Advanced Free Viewpoint Video Streaming Techniques

Free-viewpoint video is a new type of interactive multimedia service allowing users to control their viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any perspective. The uniquely generated and displayed views are composed from two or more high bitrate camera streams that must be delivered to the users depending on their continuously changing perspective. Due to significant network and computational resource requirements, we proposed scalable viewpoint generation and delivery schemes based on multicast forwarding and distributed approach. Our aim was to find the optimal deployment locations of the distributed viewpoint synthesis processes in the network topology by allowing network nodes to act as proxy servers with caching and viewpoint synthesis functionalities. Moreover, a predictive multicast group management scheme was introduced in order to provide all camera views that may be requested in the near future and prevent the viewpoint synthesizer algorithm from remaining without camera streams. The obtained results showed that even 42% traffic decrease can be realized using distributed viewpoint synthesis and the probability of viewpoint synthesis starvation can be also significantly reduced in future free viewpoint video services

On reducing mesh delay for peer-to-peer live streaming

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has emerged as a promising scalable solution for live streaming to large group. In this paper, we address the design of overlay which achieves low source-to-peer delay, is robust to user churn, accommodates of asymmetric and diverse uplink bandwidth, and continuously improves based on existing user pool. A natural choice is the use of mesh, where each peer is served by multiple parents. Since the peer delay in a mesh depends on its longest path through its parents, we study how to optimize such delay while meeting a certain streaming rate requirement. We first formulate the minimum delay mesh problem and show that it is NP-hard. Then we propose a centralized heuristic based on complete knowledge which serves as our benchmark and optimal solution for all the other schemes under comparison. Our heuristic makes use of the concept of power in network given by the ratio of throughput and delay. By maximizing the network power, our heuristic achieves very low delay. We then propose a simple distributed algorithm where peers select their parents based on the power concept. The algorithm makes continuous improvement on delay until some minimum delay is reached. Simulation results show that our distributed protocol performs close to the centralized one, and substantially outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art approaches