Friday, March 1, 2013

DASH-related papers at NOSSDAV, MoVid, and MMSys 2013, Feb 27 - Mar 1, Oslo, Norway

NOSSDAV and MoVid are co-located with MMSys'13 which had a couple of interesting papers related to DASH. The title and abstract is provided here and the proceedings of all three event will be available at the ACM digital library soon.


NOSSDAV

Title: Server-Based Traffic Shaping for Stabilizing Oscillating Adaptive Streaming Players
Authors: S. Akhshabi, L. Anantakrishnan, C. Dovrolis, A. Begen
Abstract: Prior work has shown that two or more adaptive streaming players can be unstable when they compete for bandwidth. The root cause of the instability problem is that, in Steady-State, a player goes through an ON-OFF activity pattern in which it overestimates the available bandwidth. We propose a server-based traffic shaping method that can significantly reduce such oscillations without significant (or any) loss in bandwidth utilization. The shaper is only activated when oscillations are detected, and it dynamically adjusts the shaping rate so that the player should ideally receive the highest available video profile while being stable. We evaluate the proposed method experimentally in terms of instability and utilization comparing with the unshaped case, under several scenarios.

MMSys

Title: SABRE: A Client Based Technique for Mitigating the Buffer Bloat Effect of Adaptive Video Flows
Authors: Ahmed Mansy, Bill Ver Steeg, Mostafa Ammar
Abstract: HTTP adaptive video streaming is an emerging technology that aims to deliver video quality to clients in a manner that accommodates available bandwidth and its fluctuations. In this scheme, a video stream is split at the server into small video files encoded at multiple bitrates. The video is composed at the client by downloading these files over HTTP and TCP. Although there are some efforts to standardize media representation for this technology, adaptation techniques remain an open area for development. Recently, an alarm was raised by a study about the interaction between TCP congestion control algorithms and large buffers on the Internet. Queuing delays when these buffers are full can reach several hundreds of milliseconds in a phenomenon that was dubbed buffer bloat. In this paper we use measurements on a testbed to demonstrate and quantify the buffer bloat effect of HTTP adaptive streaming. We show that in a typical residential setting a single video stream can easily cause queuing delays up to one second and even more hence seriously degrading the performance of other applications sharing the home network. We develop SABRE (Smooth Adaptive Bit RatE), a scheme that can be implemented by the client to mitigate this problem. We implemented SABRE in the VLC player. Using our testbed, we show that our technique can reduce buffer occupancy and significantly diminish the buffer bloat effect without affecting the experience of the video viewer.

Title: Distributed DASH Dataset
Authors: S. Lederer, C. Mueller, C. Timmerer, C. Concolato, J. Feuvre, K. Fliegel
Abstract: The delivery of multimedia content over HTTP and on top of existing Internet infrastructures is becoming the preferred method within heterogeneous environment. The basic design principle is having an intelligent client which selects given and applicable media representations by issuing HTTP requests for individual segments based on the users' context and current conditions. Typically, this client behavior differs between implementations of the same kind and for the objective evaluations thereof appropriate datasets are needed. This paper presents a distributed dataset for the recently published MPEG-DASH standard which is mirrored at different sites across Europe, namely Klagenfurt, Paris, and Prague. A client implementation may choose to request segments from these sites and dynamically switch to a different location, e.g., in case the one currently used causes any issues. Hence, this distributed DASH dataset can be used for real-world evaluations enabling the simulation of switching between different content delivery networks. Finally, it is also offers a registration service for additional sites to join and, thus, expand the distribution of the dataset even further.

Title: Live HTTP Streaming of Video and Subtitles within a Browser
Authors: C. Concolato, J. Feuvre
Abstract: Video streaming has become a very popular application on the web, with rich player interfaces and subtitle integration. Additionally, live streaming solutions are deployed based on HTTP Streaming solutions. However, the integration of video and subtitles in live streaming solutions still poses some problems. This paper describes a demonstration of live streaming of video and subtitle data using the MPEG-DASH technology and its synchronous playback in a web browser. It presents the formats, architecture and technical choices made for this demonstration and shows that it is feasible with upcoming browsers, paving the way for richer web video applications.

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