Mark Handley

Multimedia proxy caching mechanism for quality adaptive streaming applications in the Internet

The Internet has witnessed a rapid growth in deployment of Web-based streaming applications during recent years. In these applications, the server should be able to perform end-to-end congestion control and quality adaptation to match the delivered stream quality to the average available bandwidth. Thus the delivered quality is limited by the bottleneck bandwidth on the path to the client. This paper proposes a proxy caching mechanism for layered-encoded multimedia streams in the Internet to maximize the delivered quality of popular streams to interested clients. The main challenge is to replay a quality-variable cached stream while performing quality adaptation effectively in response to the variations in available bandwidth. We present a prefetching mechanism to support higher quality cached streams during subsequent playbacks and improve the quality of the cached stream with its popularity. We exploit inherent properties of multimedia streams to extend the semantics of popularity and capture both level of interest among clients and usefulness of a layer in the cache. We devise a fine-grain replacement algorithm suited for layered-encoded streams. Our simulation results show that the interaction between the replacement algorithm and prefetching mechanism causes the state of the cache to converge to an efficient state such that the quality of a cached stream is proportional to its popularity, and the variations in quality of a cached stream are inversely proportional to its popularity. This implies that after serving several requests for a stream, the proxy can effectively hide low bandwidth paths to the original server from interested clients.

Layered quality adaptation for Internet video streaming

Streaming audio and video applications are becoming increasingly popular on the Internet, and the lack of effective congestion control in such applications is now a cause for significant concern. The problem is one of adapting the compression without requiring video servers to reencode the data, and fitting the resulting stream into the rapidly varying available bandwidth. At the same time, rapid fluctuations in quality will be disturbing to the users and should be avoided. We present a mechanism for using layered video in the context of unicast congestion control. This quality adaptation mechanism adds and drops layers of the video stream to perform long-term coarse-grain adaptation, while using a TCP-friendly congestion control mechanism to react to congestion on very short timescales. The mismatches between the two timescales are absorbed using buffering at the receiver. We present an efficient scheme for the distribution of available bandwidth among the active layers. Our scheme allows the server to trade short-term improvement for long-term smoothing of quality. We discuss the issues involved in implementing and tuning such a mechanism, and present our simulation results.