Predictive CDN Selection for Video Delivery Based on LSTM Network Performance Forecasts and Cost-Effective Trade-Offs

Owing to increasing consumption of video streams and demand for higher quality content and more advanced displays, future telecommunication networks are expected to outperform current networks in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs). Currently, content delivery networks (CDNs) are used to enhance media availability and delivery performance across the Internet in a cost-effective manner. The proliferation of CDN vendors and business models allows the content provider (CP) to use multiple CDN providers simultaneously. However, extreme concurrency dynamics can affect CDN capacity, causing performance degradation and outages, while overestimated demand affects costs. 5G standardization communities envision advanced network functions executing video analytics to enhance or boost media services. Network accelerators are required to enforce CDN resilience and efficient utilization of CDN assets. In this regard, this study investigates a cost-effective service to dynamically select the CDN for each session and video segment at the Media Server, without any modification to the video streaming pipeline being required. This service performs time series forecasts by employing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to process real time measurements coming from connected video players. This service also ensures reliable and cost-effective content delivery through proactive selection of the CDN that fits with performance and business constraints. To this end, the proposed service predicts the number of players that can be served by each CDN at each time; then, it switches the required players between CDNs to keep the (Quality of Service) QoS rates or to reduce the CP's operational expenditure (OPEX). The proposed solution is evaluated by a real server, CDNs, and players and delivering dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), where clients are notified to switch to another CDN through a standard MPEG-DASH media presentation description (MPD) update mechanismThis work was supported in part by the EC projects Fed4Fire+, under Grant 732638 (H2020-ICT-13-2016, Research and Innovation Action), and in part by Open-VERSO project (Red Cervera Program, Spanish Government's Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology

Interoperable technologies for multi-device media services

212 p.Estamos viviendo una clara y poderosa tendencia hacia aplicaciones basadas en la Web, sustentadas en el progreso de HTML5 y, cada vez, con más dispositivos capaces de ejecutar este tipo de aplicaciones. Sin embargo, las aplicaciones siempre se ejecutan de forma aislada una de otra, sin una comunicación real entre ellas. Además, el creciente interés en las soluciones de segunda pantalla para ampliar la experiencia del usuario con las televisiones conectadas, evidencia un claro auge del sector y unas expectativas de los usuarios hacia una experiencia más consistente a través de los diferentes dispositivos y los servicios. No obstante, para conseguir esto, actualmente los radiodifusores y los proveedores de servicio tienen que desarrollar e implementar soluciones muy complejas y especializadas para unos dispositivos concretos y unos casos de uso específicos. Es necesario encontrar una solución más versátil e interoperable, que permita la implementación de servicios multimedia de manera independiente del dispositivo final. El reto es modificar el paradigma de desarrollo de servicios conectados, estableciendo las bases para extender las aplicaciones basadas en HTML hacia una forma estándar e interoperable de especificar y desarrollar aplicaciones multimedia avanzadas conectadas a Internet. En este trabajo de investigación se proponen tecnologías interoperables para ofrecer servicios multimedia multi-dispositivo que aborden los siguientes retos: adaptación, sincronización y conexión. Del mismo modo, la investigación propone una solución para complementar los recursos de computación en dos direcciones