Because Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) often have a high packet loss rate, the formerly used protocol for video streaming, Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), is no longer suitable for this specific environment. Previous conducted research has offered many new protocols to solve this problem; however, most of them cannot make full use of the existing Internet video streaming resources like RTP servers. Our work proposes two models to solve this compatibility issue. The first model is called the converter model. Based on this model, we first modify RTP using Erasure Coding (EC) technique in order to adapt it to the high packet loss rate of VANETs. This newly developed protocol is called EC-RTP. And, we then developed two converters. The first converter stands on the boundary between the Internet and VANETs. It receives the RTP packets which sent from Internet. And then it translates them to the EC-RTP packets. These packets are transported over the VANETs. The second converter receives these EC-RTP packets, translates them back to the RTP packets. It then sends them to the RTP player, so that the RTP player can play these packets. To make EC-RTP can carry more kinds of video streams other than RTP, we proposed a second model. The second model is called the redundancy tunnel. Based on this model, we let the protocol between the two converters carry RTP protocol as its payload. We use the same technique as we have used to modify RTP. At last, we did some experiments with Android tablets. The experiment results show our solution can use the same player to play the same video resources as RTP does. However, unlike RTP, it can reduce packet loss rate.

Accompanying the increasing interest on Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET), there is a request for high quality and real-time video streaming on VANET, for safety and infotainment applications. Video Streaming on VANET faces extra issues, comparing to the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), like the high dynamic topology. However, there are also benefits in VANET, like large buffer and battery capacity, predictable motion of vehicles and powerful CPU and GPU. Video streaming on VANET can be highly improved by these features. However the poor performance of wireless networks is an critical issue for video streaming in VANET. The high packet loss probability of wireless networks significantly reduces the quality of the transmitted video. An error recovery process is proposed in our research for high quality and real-time video streaming in VANET, which is call Multi-path Error Recovery Video Streaming (MERVS). The performance improvement of wireless networks is also considered in our research. The cross layer technique is adopted in our research, in order to increase the accuracy on the network condition monitoring and to guarantee the fairness on network resource distribution. Cross layer protocols on both the Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Network layer are proposed to improve the performance collaboratively. The contribution of my researches are: 1) I proposed a MERVS, which provides high quality and real-time video streaming; 2) several improvement techniques are also designed to improve the performance of MERVS; 3) simulation results verifies that MERVS can have a higher quality on transmitted video comparing to the existing protocols in an acceptable delay.

Video streaming over the best-effort networks is a challenging problem due to the time-varying and uncertain characteristics of the links. When multiple video streams are present in a network, they share and compete for the common bandwidth. In such a setting, a bandwidth allocation algorithm is required to distribute the available resources among the streams in a fair and efficient way. Specifically, it is desired to establish fairness across end-users' Quality of Experience (QoE). In this research, we propose three novel methods to provide QoE-fair network bandwidth allocation among multiple video streaming sessions. First, we formulate the problem of bandwidth allocation for video flows in the context of Network Utility Maximization (NUM) framework, using sigmoidal utility functions, rather than conventional but unrealistic concave functions. An approximation algorithm for Sigmoidal Programming (SP) is utilized to solve the resulting nonconvex optimization problem, called NUM-SP. Simulation results indicate improvements of at least 60% in average utility/QoE and 45% in fairness, while using slightly less network resources, compared to two representative methods. Subsequently, we take a collaborative decision-theoretic approach to the problem of rate adaptation among multiple video streaming sessions, and design a multi-objective foresighted optimization model for network resource allocation. A social welfare function is constructed to capture both fairness and efficiency objectives at the same time. Then, assuming a common altruistic goal for all network users, we use multi-agent decision processes to find the optimal policies for all players. We propose a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) model for the conventional IP networks and a Multi-agent Markov Decision Process (MMDP) model for the SDN-enabled wireless networks. By planning these cooperative decision process models, we find the optimal network bandwidth allocation that leads to social welfare maximization. Distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms are also designed and proposed as a low-complexity model-free solution to these optimization problems. Simulations of the proposed methods show that the resulting optimal policies of the novel Social Utility Maximization (SUM) framework outperform existing approaches in terms of both efficiency and fairness. The Dec-POMDP model applied to a server-side rate adaptation results in 25% improvement in efficiency and 13% improvement in fairness, compared to one popular protocol of congestion control for multimedia streaming. Our performance evaluations also show that the MMDP model applied to a client-side rate adaptation like DASH improves efficiency, fairness, and social welfare by as much as 18%, 24%, and 25%, respectively compared to current state-of-the-art.

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 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.

Le domaine de la mesure des caractéristiques du trafic transitant sur un réseau a été largement traité par une vaste communauté de chercheurs, en premier lieu pour répondre aux attentes des opérateurs fournisseurs d'accès à Internet. En effet, leur première préoccupation est de savoir quel type de trafic ils doivent transporter. Une des principales caractéristiques de l'Internet est qu'il évolue très vite, de sorte que le besoin de mesures du trafic grand public ne se tarit jamais. Dans ce travail, nous abordons la question de la mesure du trafic Internet grand public par deux perspectives différentes: les mesures passives et les mesures actives. Dans la première partie de cette thèse, nous capturons et analysons passivement les statistiques des connections d'utilisateurs d'Internet durant plus d'une semaine. Nous utilisons ces données pour réviser et approfondir notre connaissance du trafic Internet résidentiel. Ensuite, nous utilisons des méthodes de regroupement pour créer des ensembles d'utilisateurs en fonctions des applications qu'ils utilisent. Nous apprenons donc qu'une vaste majorité des clients se connectent à Internet principalement pour surfer sur le Web et regarder des vidéos en streaming. Ces données nous servent aussi à évaluer de nouvelles possibilités de contrôler le trafic d'une plateforme ADSL. Comme la principale partie du trafic provient du vidéo streaming, nous prenons plusieurs instantanés de ce trafic avec des captures paquet durant une période de plusieurs années, ceci pour comprendre précisément l'évolution de ce trafic. De plus, nous analysons et relions la performance du vidéo streaming, définie par des indicateurs de qualité de service, au comportement des utilisateurs de ce service. Dans la deuxième partie de cette thèse, nous tirons parti de cette connaissance pour concevoir une sonde active capable de mesurer la qualité d'expérience des sites de vidéo streaming. Nous avons modélisé la lecture des vidéos \emph{streaming} pour pouvoir déterminer leur qualité telle qu'elle est perçue par les utilisateurs. Grâce à cet outil, nous pouvons comprendre l'impact de la sélection du serveur vidéo et du serveur DNS sur la perception de la qualité vidéo par l'utilisateur. De plus, la possibilité de réaliser des mesures depuis divers opérateurs, nous permet de détailler les politiques de distribution vidéo utilisées par les sites de streaming. / Network tomography is the study of a network's traffic characteristics using measures. This subject has already been addressed by a whole community of researchers, especially to answer the need for knowledge of residential Internet traffic that ISPs have to carry. One of the main aspects of the Internet is that it evolves very quickly, so that there is a never ending need for Internet measurements. In this work, we address the issue of residential Internet measure from two different perspectives: passive measurements and active measurements. In the first part of this thesis, we passively collect and analyse statistics of residential users' connections spanning over a whole week. We use this data to update and deepen our knowledge of Internet residential traffic. Then, we use clustering methods to form groups of users according to the application they use. This shows how the vast majority of customers are now using the Internet mainly for Web browsing and watching video Streaming. This data is also used to evaluate new opportunities for managing the traffic of a local ADSL platform. As the main part of the traffic is video streaming, we use multiple snapshots of packet captures of this traffic over a period of many years to accurately understand its evolution. Moreover we analyse and correlate its performance, defined out of quality of service indicators, to the behavior of the users of this service. In the second part of this thesis, we take advantage of this knowledge to design a new tool for actively probing the quality of experience of video streaming sites. We have modeled the playback of streaming videos so that we are able to figure out its quality as perceived by the users. With this tool, we can understand the impact of the video server selection and the DNS servers on the user's perception of the video quality. Moreover the ability to perform the experiments on different ISPs allows us to further dig into the delivery policies of video streaming sites.

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When watching interactive branched video, the viewer is given the opportunity to tailor the storyline of the video playback. This type of video puts the users in control of their viewing experiences and provides content creators with great flexibility how to personalize the viewing experience for individual viewers. When it comes to regular linear videos, the concept of having a playback bar visually presenting the playback is a well established implementation used for most (if not all) video players, but for interactive branched videos, that is not the case. Instead, most branched video implementations are typically custom-made on a per-video basis (e.g., see custom-made Netflix and BBC movies) and do not use a playback bar. With the goal to fill this void, a branched video player with a generalized playback bar that visualizes the tree-like video structure was developed in 2018 by students of the Information Technology program at Linköping University and will be made public with a publication in the near future. Within the preparatory work prior to making this branched video player public, this project included a three-phase user study, where we evaluated the playback bar and its implemented features and compared the video player with alternative designs. With this thesis, we highlight the value of a branched video playback bar and provide interesting insights into how it, and other design customization features, may best be integrated into a branched video player. Furthermore, we present an improved version of the video player in which the new implementations are based on, and motivated by, the results from the user study. Finally, we describe how further investigations may be done to evaluate the improved version of the video player.

Technology advancement increases the usage of the internet day by day. One of the most used internet services is video streaming. The major advantage of video streaming is that it allows long distance communication between people without any delay. It is known that streaming video is one of the fastest growing industries, and it has been very beneficial to the world. As the use of video streaming is increasing rapidly, it is essential to have security for video streaming. A lot of methods to secure video streaming came into existence like authentication, protocol, or some secure web hosting sites. Every method is to secure the transmission of video streaming, so these methods use either key or any other additional things to secure it. Our approach is to have a secure video streaming method without using any additional key or software. So, the method here is to encrypt the video directly and then encode it to be in the streaming format. The encryption of the video is done by a method called obscuring method. And the performance evaluation is done to the method so as to check the stability and feasibility of the system.

The transmitting of video content over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) faces a great number of challenges caused by strict QoS (Quality of Service) requirements and highly dynamic network topology. In order to tackle these challenges, multipath forwarding schemes can be regarded as potential solutions. However, route coupling effect and the path length growth severely impair the performance of multipath schemes. In this thesis, the current research status about video streaming over VANETs as well as multipath transmissions are reviewed. With the demand to discover a more suitable solution, we propose the Location-Aware Multipath Video Streaming (LIAITHON+) protocol to address video streaming over urban VANETs. LIAITHON+ uses location information to discover relatively short paths with minimal route coupling effect. The performance results have shown it outperforms the underlying single path solution as well as the node-disjoint multipath solution. In addition, the impact of added redundancy on the multipath solution is investigated through LIAITHON+. According to the results, added redundancy has a different impact depending on the data rate.