Periodic broadcast and patching services - implementation, measurement and analysis in an internet streaming video testbed

Abstract

Multimedia streaming applications can consume a significant amount of server and network resources. Periodic broadcast and patching are two approaches that use multicast transmission and client buffering in innovative ways to reduce server and network load, while at the same time allowing asynchronous access to multimedia streams by a large number of clients. Current research in this area has focussed primarily on the algorithmic aspects of these approaches, with evaluation performed via analysis or simulation. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a flexible streaming video server and client test bed that implements both periodic broadcast and patching, and explore the issues that arise when implementing these algorithms using laboratory and internet-based test beds. We present measurements detailing the overheads associated with the various server components (signaling, transmission schedule computation, data retrieval and transmission), the interactions between the various components of the architecture, and the overall end-to-end performance. We also discuss the importance of an appropriate server application-level caching policy for reducing the needed disk bandwidth at the server. We conclude with a discussion of the insights gained from our implementation and experimental evaluation.

Design and analysis of a demand adaptive and locality aware streaming media server cluster

“…In the context of scalable network delivery, several recent efforts have investigated techniques such as periodic broadcast and patching to scale the network capacity of the server to a large number of users using multicast [4,41,29,19,10]. These techniques complement our work, since all of them can be employed by DALA as well.…”

A Synthetic Streaming Quality Measurement System on IP Networks

“…In [1], Bradshaw et al implemented a streaming video testbed. Both the server and the client are designed in two layers: control layer and data layer.…”

Video delivery technologies for large-scale deployment of multimedia applications

“…Although these prototypes present a clear feasibility of the periodic broadcast approaches, they are not well suited for an unreliable environment such as the Internet where communication is very lossy. In fact, it was shown in the greedy-disk-broadcasting [12] implementation that delivering a video from east to west in the United States can cause a packet loss factor up to 20%.…”

“…For specific periodic broadcast techniques, greedy-disk broadcasting [12], striping broadcasting [44], and a variant of pagoda broadcasting [77] have been implemented. A generalized periodic broadcast server (GPBS) software that supports many periodic broadcast techniques has also been developed [82].…”