The rapid advances in networking technology have enabled large-scale deployments of online video streaming services in today's Internet. In particular, wireless Internet access technology has been one of the most transforming and empowering technologies in recent years. We have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of mobile users who access online video services through wireless access networks, such as wireless mesh networks and 3G cellular networks. Unlike in wired environment, using a dedicated stream for each video service request is very expensive for wireless networks. This simple strategy also has limited scalability when popular content is demanded by a large number of users. It is desirable to have a robust wireless access environment that can sustain a sudden spurt of interest for certain videos due to, say a current event. Moreover, due to the mobility of the video users, smooth streaming performance during the handoff is a key requirement to the robustness of the wireless access networks for mobile video users. In this dissertation, the author focuses on the robustness of the wireless mesh access (WMA) environment for mobile video users. Novel video sharing techniques are proposed to reduce the burden of video streaming in different WMA environments. The author proposes a cross-layer framework for scalable Video-on-Demand (VOD) service in multi-hop WiMax mesh networks. The author also studies the optimization problems for video multicast in a general wireless mesh networks. The WMA environment is modeled as a connected graph with a video source in one of the nodes and the video requests randomly generated from other nodes in the graph. The optimal video multicast problem in such environment is formulated as two sub-problems. The proposed solutions of the sub-problems are justified using simulation and numerical study. In the case of online video streaming, online video server does not cooperate with the access networks. In this case, the centralized data sharing technique fails since they assume the cooperation between the video server and the network. To tackle this problem, a novel distributed video sharing technique called Dynamic Stream Merging (DSM) is proposed. DSM improves the robustness of the WMA environment without the cooperation from the online video server. It optimizes the per link sharing performance with small time complexity and message complexity. The performance of DSM has been studied using simulations in Network Simulator 2 (NS2) as well as real experiments in a wireless mesh testbed. The Mobile YouTube website (http://m.youtube.com) is used as the online video website in the experiment. Last but not the least; a cross-layer scheme is proposed to avoid the degradation on the video quality during the handoff in the WMA environment. Novel video quality related triggers and the routing metrics at the mesh routers are utilized in the handoff decision making process. A redirection scheme is also proposed to eliminate packet loss caused by the handoff.

The skills enhancement when English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students are acquiring the language has been recently affected by the rapid spread of broadband Internet. More particularly since the appearance of Original Version (OV) video streaming, as it is now available for many English language teachers and students that take advantage of this verbal medium, which provides new opportunities for education and culture. In the present work, we have investigated, through empirical research, the transition from CEFR B1, through B2, towards C1 of different EFL students that have proved how unadapted captioned videos can affect the way they eventually perform when: (1) Gist understanding is evaluated by means of leaving the captions on (B1 students in Study 1). (2) The learners’ listening skills enhancement varies if they are in the habit of watching OV on a regular basis (B1-B2 students in Study 2), and (3) There is an observation of how advanced students (C1 students in Study 3) reading and listening skills improve depending on their level of voluntary exposure to OV videos in the long-term. Results lead us to conclude that the B2 level is the tipping point for students to really enjoy and take advantage of real video streaming TV shows in English as lower levels showed inconsistencies in results amongst them. Complementarily, C1 students that have been independently watching OV TV programmes on a regular basis, showed better outcomes in the listening comprehension tests than those who did not. Nevertheless, the reading comprehension results showed no difference between the two groups.

Energy consumption and correlated greenhouse gas emissions are a big global problem. It affects all parts of society, and each industrial sector must work toward reducing itscarbon footprint. This thesis details the research of different methods to model the energyconsumption of video streaming, and works towards creating a final model. The videostreaming process is broken down into a core process consisting of head-end, distribution,transmission, and terminals. The process that contributes the most to energy consumptionat the head-end is found to be video encoding. This thesis explores the energy consumption of video encoding in depth and how it is affected by parameters such as hardware,codec choice, codec preset selection, and video details such as resolution, framerate, andduration, but these parameters are found to be insufficient to accurately model the energyconsumption of video encoding. In distribution and transmission, the highest contributor is found to be content delivery networks. The energy consumption of content deliverynetworks is investigated however no appropriate model is found. For terminals, the mostimportant factor is the kind of terminal used. The energy consumption of televisions, desktop computers, laptops, and mobile terminals is investigated, and models are presented foreach. The thesis also discusses the different models, their advantages, and their shortcomings. Additionally, an application to visualize features of the model is presented.

Um die ständig wachsenden Anforderungen zur Übertragung von Live Video Streams im Internet zu erfüllen werden kosteneffektive und resourceneffiziente Lösungen benötigt. Eine adäquate Lösung bietet die Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Streaming Architektur an, welche bereits heute in unterschiedlichsten Systemen zum Einsatz kommt. Solche Systeme erfordern von der Streaming Quelle nur moderate Bandbreiten, da die Nutzer (bzw. Peers) ihre eigene Bandbreite zur Verbreitung des Streams einbringen. Dazu werden die Peers oberhalb der Internetarchitektur zu einem Overlay verbunden. Das geplante Verlassen, sowie der ungewollte Absturz von Peers (genannt Churn) kann das Overlay schädigen und den Empfang einiger Peers unterbrechen. Weitaus kritischer sind Angriffe auf die Verfügbarkeit des Systems indem relevante Knoten des Overlays von Angreifern attackiert werden, um die Verteilung des Streams gezielt zu stören. Um Overlays zu konstruieren, die robust gegenüber Churn sind, nutzen so genannte pull-basierte P2P Streaming Systeme eine Mesh Topologie um jeden Peer über mehrere Pfade mit der Quelle zu verbinden. Peers fordern regelmäßig Teile des Videos, sog. Chunks, von ihren Partnern im Overlay an. Selbst wenn einige Partner plötzlich nicht mehr im System verfügbar sind kann ein Peer alle Chunks von den verbleibenden Nachbarn beziehen. Um dies zu ermöglichen tauschen Peers regelmäßig sog. Buffer Maps aus. Diese kleinen Pakete enthalten Informationen über die Verfügbarkeit von Chunks im Puffer eines Peers. Um dadurch entstehende Latenzen und den zusätzlichen Mehraufwand zu reduzieren wurden hybride Systeme entwickelt. Ein solches System beginnt pull-basiert und formt mit der Zeit einen Baum aus einer kleinen Untermenge aller Peers um Chunks ohne explizite Anfrage weiterzuleiten. Unglücklicherweise sind sowohl pull-basierte, als auch hybride Systeme anfällig gegenüber Denial-of-Service Angriffen (DoS). Insbesondere fehlen Maßnahmen zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf die Partner der Quelle. Die genannten Angriffe werden weiterhin dadurch erleichtert, dass die Identität der Quelle-nahen Knoten akkurat aus den ausgetauschten Buffer Maps extrahiert werden kann. Hybride Systeme sind außerdem anfällig für Angriffe auf den zugrundeliegenden Baum. Aufgrund der schwerwiegenden Auswirkungen von DoS Angriffen auf pull-basierte, sowie hybride Systeme stellen wir drei Gegenmaßnahmen vor. Zuerst entwickeln wir das Striping Schema zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf die Partner der Quelle. Hierbei werden Peers dazu angeregt ihre Chunk-Anfragen an unterschiedliche Partner zu senden. Als zweites entwickeln wir das SWAP Schema, welches Peers dazu bringt proaktiv ihre Partner zu wechseln um Angreifer daran zu hindern die Quellenahe zu identifizieren. Als drittes entwickeln wir RBCS, einen widerstandsfähigen Baum zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf hybride Systeme. Da bisher kein Simulator für die faire Evaluation von P2P-basierten Live Video Streaming Algorithmen verfügbar war, entwickeln wir OSSim, ein generalisiertes Simulations-Framework für P2P-basiertes Video Streaming. Des weiteren entwickeln wir etliche Angreifermodelle sowie neuartige Resilienzmetriken on OSSim. Ausgiebige Simulationsstudien zeigen, dass die entwickelten Schemata signifikant die Widerstandsfähigkeit von pull-basierten und hybriden Systemen gegenüber Churn und DoS Angriffen erhöhen. / The constantly growing demand to watch live videos over the Internet requires streaming systems to be cost-effective and resource-efficient. The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming architecture has been a viable solution with various deployed systems to date. The system only requires a modest amount of bandwidth from the streaming source, since users (or peers) contribute their bandwidth to disseminate video streams. To enable this, the system interconnects peers into an overlay. However, churn–meaning the leaving and failing of peers–can break the overlay, making peers unable to receive the stream. More severely, an adversary aiming to sabotage the system can attack relevant nodes on the overlay, disrupting the stream delivery. To construct an overlay robust to churn, pull-based P2P streaming systems use a mesh topology to provide each peer with multiple paths to the source. Peers regularly request video chunks from their partners in the overlay. Therefore, even if some partners are suddenly absent, due to churn, a peer still can request chunks from its remaining partners. To enable this, peers periodically exchange buffer maps, small packets containing the availability information of peers’ video buffers. To reduce latency and overhead caused by the periodic buffer map exchange and chunk requests, hybrid systems have been proposed. A hybrid system bootstraps from a pull-based one and gradually forms a tree backbone consisting of a small subset of peers to deliver chunks without requests. Unfortunately, both pull-based and hybrid systems lack measures to mitigate Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on head nodes (or the source’s partners). More critically, they can be identified accurately by inferring exchanged buffer maps. Furthermore, hybrid systems are vulnerable to DoS attacks on their backbones. Since DoS attacks can badly affect both pull-based and hybrid systems, we introduce three countermeasures. First, we develop the striping scheme to mitigate DoS attacks targeting head nodes. The scheme enforces peers to diversify their chunk requests. Second, to prevent attackers from identifying head nodes, we develop the SWAP scheme, which enforces peers to proactively change their partners. Third, we develop RBCS, a resilient backbone, to mitigate DoS attacks on hybrid systems. Since a simulator for a fair evaluation is unavailable so far, we develop OSSim, a general-purpose simulation framework for P2P video streaming. Furthermore, we develop several attacker models and novel resilience metrics in OSSim. Extensive simulation studies show that the developed schemes significantly improve the resilient of pull-based and hybrid systems to both churn and DoS attacks.

No description available.

Um die ständig wachsenden Anforderungen zur Übertragung von Live Video Streams im Internet zu erfüllen werden kosteneffektive und resourceneffiziente Lösungen benötigt. Eine adäquate Lösung bietet die Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Streaming Architektur an, welche bereits heute in unterschiedlichsten Systemen zum Einsatz kommt. Solche Systeme erfordern von der Streaming Quelle nur moderate Bandbreiten, da die Nutzer (bzw. Peers) ihre eigene Bandbreite zur Verbreitung des Streams einbringen. Dazu werden die Peers oberhalb der Internetarchitektur zu einem Overlay verbunden. Das geplante Verlassen, sowie der ungewollte Absturz von Peers (genannt Churn) kann das Overlay schädigen und den Empfang einiger Peers unterbrechen. Weitaus kritischer sind Angriffe auf die Verfügbarkeit des Systems indem relevante Knoten des Overlays von Angreifern attackiert werden, um die Verteilung des Streams gezielt zu stören. Um Overlays zu konstruieren, die robust gegenüber Churn sind, nutzen so genannte pull-basierte P2P Streaming Systeme eine Mesh Topologie um jeden Peer über mehrere Pfade mit der Quelle zu verbinden. Peers fordern regelmäßig Teile des Videos, sog. Chunks, von ihren Partnern im Overlay an. Selbst wenn einige Partner plötzlich nicht mehr im System verfügbar sind kann ein Peer alle Chunks von den verbleibenden Nachbarn beziehen. Um dies zu ermöglichen tauschen Peers regelmäßig sog. Buffer Maps aus. Diese kleinen Pakete enthalten Informationen über die Verfügbarkeit von Chunks im Puffer eines Peers. Um dadurch entstehende Latenzen und den zusätzlichen Mehraufwand zu reduzieren wurden hybride Systeme entwickelt. Ein solches System beginnt pull-basiert und formt mit der Zeit einen Baum aus einer kleinen Untermenge aller Peers um Chunks ohne explizite Anfrage weiterzuleiten. Unglücklicherweise sind sowohl pull-basierte, als auch hybride Systeme anfällig gegenüber Denial-of-Service Angriffen (DoS). Insbesondere fehlen Maßnahmen zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf die Partner der Quelle. Die genannten Angriffe werden weiterhin dadurch erleichtert, dass die Identität der Quelle-nahen Knoten akkurat aus den ausgetauschten Buffer Maps extrahiert werden kann. Hybride Systeme sind außerdem anfällig für Angriffe auf den zugrundeliegenden Baum. Aufgrund der schwerwiegenden Auswirkungen von DoS Angriffen auf pull-basierte, sowie hybride Systeme stellen wir drei Gegenmaßnahmen vor. Zuerst entwickeln wir das Striping Schema zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf die Partner der Quelle. Hierbei werden Peers dazu angeregt ihre Chunk-Anfragen an unterschiedliche Partner zu senden. Als zweites entwickeln wir das SWAP Schema, welches Peers dazu bringt proaktiv ihre Partner zu wechseln um Angreifer daran zu hindern die Quellenahe zu identifizieren. Als drittes entwickeln wir RBCS, einen widerstandsfähigen Baum zur Abschwächung von DoS Angriffen auf hybride Systeme. Da bisher kein Simulator für die faire Evaluation von P2P-basierten Live Video Streaming Algorithmen verfügbar war, entwickeln wir OSSim, ein generalisiertes Simulations-Framework für P2P-basiertes Video Streaming. Des weiteren entwickeln wir etliche Angreifermodelle sowie neuartige Resilienzmetriken on OSSim. Ausgiebige Simulationsstudien zeigen, dass die entwickelten Schemata signifikant die Widerstandsfähigkeit von pull-basierten und hybriden Systemen gegenüber Churn und DoS Angriffen erhöhen. / The constantly growing demand to watch live videos over the Internet requires streaming systems to be cost-effective and resource-efficient. The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) streaming architecture has been a viable solution with various deployed systems to date. The system only requires a modest amount of bandwidth from the streaming source, since users (or peers) contribute their bandwidth to disseminate video streams. To enable this, the system interconnects peers into an overlay. However, churn–meaning the leaving and failing of peers–can break the overlay, making peers unable to receive the stream. More severely, an adversary aiming to sabotage the system can attack relevant nodes on the overlay, disrupting the stream delivery. To construct an overlay robust to churn, pull-based P2P streaming systems use a mesh topology to provide each peer with multiple paths to the source. Peers regularly request video chunks from their partners in the overlay. Therefore, even if some partners are suddenly absent, due to churn, a peer still can request chunks from its remaining partners. To enable this, peers periodically exchange buffer maps, small packets containing the availability information of peers’ video buffers. To reduce latency and overhead caused by the periodic buffer map exchange and chunk requests, hybrid systems have been proposed. A hybrid system bootstraps from a pull-based one and gradually forms a tree backbone consisting of a small subset of peers to deliver chunks without requests. Unfortunately, both pull-based and hybrid systems lack measures to mitigate Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on head nodes (or the source’s partners). More critically, they can be identified accurately by inferring exchanged buffer maps. Furthermore, hybrid systems are vulnerable to DoS attacks on their backbones. Since DoS attacks can badly affect both pull-based and hybrid systems, we introduce three countermeasures. First, we develop the striping scheme to mitigate DoS attacks targeting head nodes. The scheme enforces peers to diversify their chunk requests. Second, to prevent attackers from identifying head nodes, we develop the SWAP scheme, which enforces peers to proactively change their partners. Third, we develop RBCS, a resilient backbone, to mitigate DoS attacks on hybrid systems. Since a simulator for a fair evaluation is unavailable so far, we develop OSSim, a general-purpose simulation framework for P2P video streaming. Furthermore, we develop several attacker models and novel resilience metrics in OSSim. Extensive simulation studies show that the developed schemes significantly improve the resilient of pull-based and hybrid systems to both churn and DoS attacks.

Being able to interact with video streams can be both fun, educational and provide help during disaster situations. However, to achieve the best user experience the interaction must be seamless. This thesis presents the design and implementation of an interface for a media player that allows for users to view multiple video streams of the same event from different geographical positions and angles. The thesis first describes the system design and methods used to implement this kind of media player and explains how to achieve a seemingly good and, to a higher extent, enjoyable video streaming experience. Second, an algorithm is developed for placing each video stream object on the interface's geographic-based map automatically. These objects are placed to ensure the relative positions of the objects compared to the real world. The end result of this project is a proof-of-concept media player which enables a user to see an overview over a geographical streaming area. Presented with the relative location of each stream to the point of interest the player allows the user to click on that stream and switch to viewing the recordings from that point of view. While the resulting player is not yet seamless, the result of this project shows the command-and-control center as initially envisioned. Implementing seamless, uninterrupted, switching between the video streams is outside the scope of this thesis. However, as demonstrated and argued in the thesis, the work done here and the developed software code will allow for easy integration of more advanced prefetching algorithms in future and parallel works.

The video streaming applications contribute to a major share of the Internet traffic. Consequently, monitoring and management of video streaming quality has gained a significant importance in the recent years. The disturbances in the video, such as, amount of buffering and bitrate adaptations affect user Quality of Experience (QoE). Network operators usually monitor such events from network traffic with the help of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). However, it is becoming difficult to monitor such events due to the traffic encryption. To address this challenge, this thesis work makes two key contributions. First, it presents a test-bed, which performs automated video streaming tests under controlled time-varying network conditions and measures performance at network and application level. Second, it develops and evaluates machine learning models for the detection of video buffering and bitrate adaptation events, which rely on the information extracted from packets headers. The findings of this work suggest that buffering and bitrate adaptation events within 60 second intervals can be detected using Random Forest model with an accuracy of about 70%. Moreover, the results show that the features based on time-varying patterns of downlink throughput and packet inter-arrival times play a distinctive role in the detection of such events.

Streaming video applications on the Internet generally have very high bandwidth requirements and yet are often unresponsive to network congestion. In order to avoid congestion collapse and improve video quality, these applications need to respond to congestion in the network by deploying mechanisms to reduce their bandwidth requirements under conditions of heavy load. In reducing bandwidth, video with high motion will look better if all the frames are kept but the frames have low quality, while video with low motion will look better if some frames are dropped but the remaining frames have high quality. Unfortunately current video applications scale to fit the available bandwidth without regard to the video content. In this thesis, we present an adaptive content-aware scaling mechanism that reduces the bandwidth occupied by an application by either dropping frames (temporal scaling) or by reducing the quality of the frames transmitted (quality scaling). We have designed a streaming video client and server with the server capable of quantifying the amount of motion in an MPEG stream and scaling each scene either temporally or by quality as appropriate, maximizing the appearance of each video stream. We have evaluated the impact of content-aware scaling by conducting a user study wherein the subjects rated the quality of video clips that were first scaled temporally and then by quality in order to establish the optimal mechanism for scaling a particular stream. We find that content-aware scaling can improve video quality by as much as 50%. We have also evaluated the practical impact of adaptively scaling the video stream by conducting a user study for longer video clips with varying amounts of motion and available bandwidth. We find that for such clips also the improvement in perceptual quality on account of adaptive content-aware scaling is as high as 30%

Distribution over the internet is destined to become a standard approach for live broadcasting of TV or events of nation-wide interest. The demand for high-quality live video with personal requirements is destined to grow exponentially over the next few years. Endsystem multicast is a desirable option for relieving the content server from bandwidth bottlenecks and computational load by allowing decentralised allocation of resources to the users and distributed service management. Network coding provides innovative solutions for a multitude of issues related to multi-user content distribution, such as the coupon-collection problem, allocation and scheduling procedure. This thesis tackles the problem of streaming scalable video on end-system multicast overlays with prioritised push-based streaming. We analyse the characteristic arising from a random coding process as a linear channel operator, and present a novel error detection and correction system for error-resilient decoding, providing one of the first practical frameworks for Joint Source-Channel-Network coding. Our system outperforms both network error correction and traditional FEC coding when performed separately. We then present a content distribution system based on endsystem multicast. Our data exchange protocol makes use of network coding as a way to collaboratively deliver data to several peers. Prioritised streaming is performed by means of hierarchical network coding and a dynamic chunk selection for optimised rate allocation based on goodput statistics at application layer. We prove, by simulated experiments, the efficient allocation of resources for adaptive video delivery. Finally we describe the implementation of our coding system. We highlighting the use rateless coding properties, discuss the application in collaborative and distributed coding systems, and provide an optimised implementation of the decoding algorithm with advanced CPU instructions. We analyse computational load and packet loss protection via lab tests and simulations, complementing the overall analysis of the video streaming system in all its components.