Video dissemination capabilities are crucial for the deployment of many services over VANETs. These services range from enhancing safety via the dissemination of video from the scene of an accident, to advertisement of local services or businesses. This work considers the infrastructure-less scenario of VANETs and dissemination of video content over this network environment, which is extremely challenging mainly due to its dynamic topology and stringent requirements for video streaming. This study discusses issues and challenges that need to be tackled for disseminating high-quality video over VANETs. Furthermore it surveys and analyzes the suitability of different existing solutions aimed towards effective and efficient techniques for video dissemination in vehicular networks. As a result, a set of the most promising techniques are selected, described in detail and evaluated based on standard terms in quality of service. This thesis also discusses efficiency and suitability of these techniques for video dissemination and compares their performance over the same network condition. In addition, a detailed study on the effect of network coding on video dissemination protocols has been conducted to guide how to employ this technique properly for video streaming over VANETs. From this study, a summary of the observations was obtained and used to design a new hybrid solution by deploying robust and efficient techniques in number of existing protocols in an optimal manner. The proposed hybrid video dissemination protocol outperforms other protocols in term of delivery ratio and complies with other quality-of-service requirements for video broadcasting over vehicular environments.

Video streaming applications over wireless networks have turned out to be immensely popular recently. In this thesis, we first study the buffering schemes for the VBR video streaming in heterogeneous wireless networks. An analytical framework is presented to derive the expected number of jitters and average buffering delay. Through experimenting with a wide range of buffering schemes, we quantify the bene¯t of incorporating user location information in streaming over heterogeneous wireless networks. Second, we consider the delivery of scalable VBR video streams over wireless channels. We propose adaptive rate control algorithms to improve the combined system performance of video frame quality and playout smoothness based on the feedback information of wireless network estimation, buffer content and playback situation. The proposed adaptive rate control algorithms provide significantly improved streaming quality compared with the non-control policy.

Video streaming applications over wireless networks have turned out to be immensely popular recently. In this thesis, we first study the buffering schemes for the VBR video streaming in heterogeneous wireless networks. An analytical framework is presented to derive the expected number of jitters and average buffering delay. Through experimenting with a wide range of buffering schemes, we quantify the bene¯t of incorporating user location information in streaming over heterogeneous wireless networks. Second, we consider the delivery of scalable VBR video streams over wireless channels. We propose adaptive rate control algorithms to improve the combined system performance of video frame quality and playout smoothness based on the feedback information of wireless network estimation, buffer content and playback situation. The proposed adaptive rate control algorithms provide significantly improved streaming quality compared with the non-control policy.

Delivering high-quality of video to end users over the best-effort Internet is a challenging task since quality of streaming video is highly subject to network conditions. A fundamental issue in this area is how real-time applications cope with network dynamics and adapt their operational behavior to offer a favorable streaming environment to end users. As an effort towards providing such streaming environment, the first half of this work focuses on analyzing the performance of video streaming in best-effort networks and developing a new streaming framework that effectively utilizes unequal importance of video packets in rate control and achieves a near-optimal performance for a given network packet loss rate. In addition, we study error concealment methods such as FEC (Forward-Error Correction) that is often used to protect multimedia data over lossy network channels. We investigate the impact of FEC on the quality of video and develop models that can provide insights into understanding how inclusion of FEC affects streaming performance and its optimality and resilience characteristics under dynamically changing network conditions. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on measuring bandwidth of network paths, which plays an important role in characterizing Internet paths and can benefit many applications including multimedia streaming. We conduct a stochastic analysis of an end-to-end path and develop novel bandwidth sampling techniques that can produce asymptotically accurate capacity and available bandwidth of the path under non-trivial cross-traffic conditions. In addition, we conduct comparative performance study of existing bandwidth estimation tools in non-simulated networks where various timing irregularities affect delay measurements. We find that when high-precision packet timing is not available due to hardware interrupt moderation, the majority of existing algorithms are not robust to measure end-to-end paths with high accuracy. We overcome this problem by using signal de-noising techniques in bandwidth measurement. We also develop a new measurement tool called PRC-MT based on theoretical models that simultaneously measures the capacity and available bandwidth of the tight link with asymptotic accuracy.

The past decade has witnessed tremendous growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming applications on the Internet. For these applications, playback smoothness and timeliness are the two most important aspects of users' viewing experiences, whereas the amount of traffic is Internet service providers' main concern. According to the playback delay, video streaming can be classified into on-demand streaming, live streaming, and interactive streaming. P2P live streaming applications typically have an arbitrary number of users, tens of seconds of playback delay, and a high packet delivery rate, but their heavy traffic incurs great financial expenditure and threatens the quality of other services. Interactive streaming applications usually have a small group size, several hundreds of milliseconds of playback delay, and reasonable traffic volume, but cannot achieve a high packet delivery rate. The goal of this thesis is to study traffic locality and reliable delivery of packets in large-scale live streaming and small-scale interactive streaming applications, while keeping the playback delay well below the targeted applications' limits. For P2P live streaming applications, we first identify "typical" schemes from existing P2P live streaming schemes, investigate packet propagation behavior and the impact of neighboring strategies on system performance, and then propose innovative schemes that take both users' viewing experience and traffic locality into consideration. We show that the network-driven tree-based schemes with the swarming technique as a re-transmission error-correction mechanism are superior to the data-driven swarm-based or tree-based schemes, and a properly designed tree-based scheme can localize the traffic while maintaining a high packet delivery rate. For interactive streaming applications, we analyze the efficacy of systematic forward error-correction (FEC) codes against the bursty errors of Internet links when using peers to provide multiple one-hop paths between two communication parties. We find that although using peers for path diversity often results in a lower post-FEC packet loss ratio, some conditions do apply. The interplay of a number of factors, such as the Internet links' error ratio and burst length and the coding parameters, determines the performance of FEC. We provide guidelines and computation methods to determine whether the use of peers for path diversity can be justified. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-26 15:20:35.555

Not long ago streaming video over the Internet included only short clips of low quality video. Now the possibilities seem endless as professional productions are made available in high definition. This explosion of growth is the result of several factors, such as increasing network performance, advancements in video encoding technology, improvements to video streaming techniques, and a growing number of devices capable of handling video. However, despite the improvements to Internet video streaming this paradigm is still evolving. HTTP adaptive streaming involves encoding a video at multiple quality levels then dividing those quality levels into small chunks. The player can then determine which quality level to retrieve the next chunk from in order to optimize video playback when considering the underlying network conditions. This thesis first presents an experimental framework that allows for adaptive streaming players to be analyzed and evaluated. Evaluation is beneficial because there are several concerns with the adaptive video streaming ecosystem such as achieving a high video playback quality while also ensuring stable playback quality. The primary contribution of this thesis is the evaluation of prefetching by a proxy server as a means to improve streaming performance. This work considers an implementation of a proxy server that is functional with the extremely popular Netflix streaming service, and it is evaluated using two Netflix players. The results show its potential to improve video streaming performance in several scenarios. It effectively increases the buffer capacity of the player as chunks can be prefetched in advance of the player's request then stored on the proxy to be quickly delivered once requested. This allows for degradation in network conditions to be hidden from the player while the proxy serves prefetched data, preventing a reduction to the video quality as a result of an overreaction by the player. Further, the proxy can reduce the impact of the bottleneck in the network, achieving higher throughput by utilizing parallel connections to the server.

Video dissemination capabilities are crucial for the deployment of many services over VANETs. These services range from enhancing safety via the dissemination of video from the scene of an accident, to advertisement of local services or businesses. This work considers the infrastructure-less scenario of VANETs and dissemination of video content over this network environment, which is extremely challenging mainly due to its dynamic topology and stringent requirements for video streaming. This study discusses issues and challenges that need to be tackled for disseminating high-quality video over VANETs. Furthermore it surveys and analyzes the suitability of different existing solutions aimed towards effective and efficient techniques for video dissemination in vehicular networks. As a result, a set of the most promising techniques are selected, described in detail and evaluated based on standard terms in quality of service. This thesis also discusses efficiency and suitability of these techniques for video dissemination and compares their performance over the same network condition. In addition, a detailed study on the effect of network coding on video dissemination protocols has been conducted to guide how to employ this technique properly for video streaming over VANETs. From this study, a summary of the observations was obtained and used to design a new hybrid solution by deploying robust and efficient techniques in number of existing protocols in an optimal manner. The proposed hybrid video dissemination protocol outperforms other protocols in term of delivery ratio and complies with other quality-of-service requirements for video broadcasting over vehicular environments.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are no longer a futuristic promise but rather an attainable technology. Vehicles are already equipped with a variety of computational devices that control or assist drivers in many tasks such as localization, safely breaking, parking and passengers entertainment. The majority of services envisioned for VANETs either require the provision of multimedia support or have it as an extremely beneficial additional feature. In particular, video streaming capabilities over VANETs are crucial to the development of interesting and valuable services. However,VANETs’ highly dynamic topology poses as a demanding challenge to the fulfillment of video streaming’s stringent requirements. The main goal on this thesis is the development of feasible solutions that support the streaming of video content over VANETs. Initially, the main issues of VANETs are explained through both a discussion of its characteristics and the results of some preliminary conclusions. Based on this understanding of VANETs’ peculiarities, three distinguishing solutions are designed REACT-DIS, REDEC and VIRTUS; the two first for video dissemination and the later for video unicast. These solutions offer a great advancement towards the provision of video streaming capabilities but packet loss is still an issue at high data rates. In order to improve the delivery ratios reached by the previous solutions, redundancy is used as an error correction mechanism. The use of redundancy is ideal for VANETs in handling packet loss as they do not require any interaction between source and receivers nodes. Sophisticated coding techniques were used for an efficient use of the increase on entropy of the information sent by the source node. It was also evaluated the selective use of redundancy solely on packets carrying the crucial information of I-frames. Although this selective approach obtained lower overall delivery ratios than when redundancy is used for all packets, the video quality obtained similar improvements under a much lower cost. The evaluation on the use of redundancy has considered the impact on the rate by which unique video content is received at end-users which is fundamental to understand the resolution of videos that can be displayed. This thesis provides several contributions as it advances the knowledge in the peculiarities of VANETs, solutions for video streaming over VANETs and the use of redundancy as an error correction mechanism for video streaming over VANETs.

Video streaming over the Internet can be very difficult under the traditional client-server model. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, in which each participating peer contributes its upload bandwidth to other peers while it downloads data, have been successful in file-sharing applications, and they appear to be promising in delivering video contents, too. However, the existence of network address translation (NAT) is always considered as a challenge to peer-to-peer systems. NAT has been a practical solution to the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address exhaustion problem, as it reduces the usage of IP addresses by allowing multiple private hosts to share a single public IP address, but NAT can degrade the performance of a peer-to-peer system as it limits the direction of connectivity. Measurement studies show that a considerable fraction of peer-to-peer video streaming system users are behind NAT devices, and that their uplink bandwidth is not well utilized, but the literature lacks a quantitative analysis of the impact of NAT on the performance of P2P video streaming systems. In this thesis, an extensible analytical model is built to capture the performance for P2P live streaming systems with a certain percentage of users behind NAT and cannot be reached by NAT traversal techniques, the correctness of which is verified by software simulation. A simple mechanism is proposed in this thesis, which is able to effectively improve the system performance and fairness by counteracting the negative impact of NAT, and it can also be used to reduce the usage of server bandwidth. / Graduate

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T16:01:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo8983_1.pdf: 2694145 bytes, checksum: eada2ca72336a7b81aacb802940a6312 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / A popularização do serviço de Internet e a redução de custo facilitaram o acesso de usuários a diversos provedores de conteúdo, sejam estes baseados em voz, vídeo ou qualquer outro recurso de multimídia. Consequentemente aumentam os benefícios de ter uma rede de comunicações de melhor resiliência, pois quando uma conexão falha os dados podem fluir por conexões alternativas, reduzindo a probabilidade de perdas de pacotes e falhas na transmissão. Dessa forma, abre-se um novo cenário de estudo que tem a intenção de verificar e propor melhoras em formas de uso dos protocolos de comunicação que tenham o objetivo de tornar confiável a escolha dos melhores caminhos de transmissão para cada tipo de conteúdo. Para a transmissão de stream de vídeo, a escolha do protocolo de transporte é tão importante quanto a escolha de algoritmos e estruturas de dados em relação à aplicação rede. O estudo do desempenho de protocolos de rede de transportes é essencial para o desenvolvimento de protocolos tolerantes a falhas. A avaliação de políticas combinado com o caminho de transmissão, e os limiares de detecção de falhas, largura de banda, atrasos e perda de vazão são avaliados através da simulação dos diferentes protocolos de transmissão utilizado. O comportamento dos protocolos são verificados, comparando o tráfego considerando caminhos alternativos simétricas e assimétricas. O protocolo escolhido para o estudo é o UDP, devido à sua popularidade e sua tolerância a perda. Mostramos neste estudo que a configuração do tamanho do GOP (Group Of Picture) e a utilização correta do tamanho do Frame do UDP podem contribuir para uma transmissão de Vídeo Stream com melhor qualidade utilizando-se dos recursos de conexões disponíveis (seleção de caminhos) na rede