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Beyond 1Mbps Global Overlay Live Streaming: The Case of Proxy Helpers

Published: 07 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

In order to provide live streaming over the global Internet, a content provider often deploys an overlay network consisting of distributed proxies placed close to user pools. Streaming of multi-Mbps video over such an overlay is challenging because of bandwidth bottlenecks in paths. To effectively overcome these bottlenecks, we consider employing proxy helpers in the overlay to provide rich path diversity. The helpers do not have any attached users, and hence may forward partial video streams (or not at all) if necessary. In this way, the helpers serve as stepping stones to supply full streams to the servers. The issue is how to involve the helpers in the overlay to achieve low streaming delay meeting a certain high streaming bitrate requirement.
To address the issue, we first formulate the problem which captures various delay and bandwidth components, and show that it is NP-hard. We then propose an efficient algorithm called Stepping-Stones (SS) which can be efficiently implemented in a controller. Given the encouraging simulation results, we develop a novel streaming testbed for SS and explore, through sets of Internet experiments, the effectiveness of helpers to achieve high bitrate (multi-Mbps) global live streaming. In our experiments, proxies are deployed with a reasonably wide global footprint. We collect more than a hundred hours of streaming traces with bitrate ranging from 500kbps to a few Mbps. Our experimental data validates that helpers indeed play an important role in achieving high bitrate in today's Internet. Global multi-Mbps streaming is possible due to their multihop and multipath advantages. Our experimental trials and data also provide valuable insights on the design of a global push-based streaming network. There are strong benefits of using proxy helpers to achieve high bitrate and low delay.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 11, Issue 2
December 2014
197 pages
ISSN:1551-6857
EISSN:1551-6865
DOI:10.1145/2716635
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 07 January 2015
Accepted: 01 July 2014
Revised: 01 July 2014
Received: 01 October 2013
Published in TOMM Volume 11, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Multi-Mbps video
  2. global live streaming
  3. proxy helpers
  4. testbed experiment

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund (UIM/246)
  • Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) General Research Fund (610713)
  • HKUST (FSGRF13EG15)

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