Supervisors info:
Λάζαρος Μεράκος, Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Πληροφορικής και Τηλεπικοινωνιών, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has prevailed as the dominant way of video transmission over the Internet. This technology is based on receiving small sequential video segments from a server. However, one challenge that has not been adequately examined, is the obtainment of video segments from more than one server, in a way that serves both the needs of the network and the improvement of the Quality of Experience (QoE). This thesis will investigate this problem by simulating a network with multiple video servers and a video client. It will then implement both the peer-to-many communication in the context of adaptive video streaming and the video server caching algorithm based on proposed criteria that will improve the status of the network and/or the user. All of this will be explored in the environment of Mininet, which is a network emulator, in order to simulate the DASH technology with the help of the emulator network nodes. Initially, the video was split into small segments using the ffmpeg tool, and then experiments were conducted in which a client requested the video from a cache server. If the segment could not be found in the cache server, then a request was sent from the cache server to a server that contained all segments of the video (main server). In these experiments, the added traffic was also examined, by concluded to the fact that the Mininet environment causes unavoidable limitations in the case of the traffic. What we observed was that the main server channel remained inactive throughout the requests of the cache server, resulting in unrealistic network conditions. For this reason, we have explored a new approach, eliminating the Mininet environment and working on new techniques for adding web traffic and modifying the communication of the servers, regarding the requests they receive. In this way, we were able to clearly show the limitations of the previous approach but also to conclude that the existence of caching servers is a useful tool in terms of increasing the quality of experience. The general tendency was that, as the available buffer size increased, the video playback quality increased to some extent. However, at the same time this improvement is linked to the random selection algorithm. For even better results, it is considered necessary to find an appropriate caching selection algorithm in order to take full advantage of the caching technology.
The following chapters presented in this thesis are: Chapter 1 mentions the historical background of the networks. Chapter 2 analyzes the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. Chapter 3 analyzes the caching techniques. Chapter 4 presents the concept of Quality of Experience and its correlation with many other factors. Chapter 5 describes in detail the process of setting up the environment and the various necessary tools for our implementation. Chapter 6 refers to the Mininet experiments, the topology, and the set-up, as well as the reasons that led us to a different approach. Chapter 7 proposes the different approach and presents the methodology and the metrics. Also, diagrams extracted from the analysis of the metrics are analyzed in Chapter 7. Finally, Chapter 8 summarizes the conclusions and issues of future research to improve the Quality of Experience even further.
Keywords:
Quality of Experience, Video, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, Mininet, Caching
