9. Additional Video Streaming Topics


9. Additional Video Streaming Topics

Multicast

Multicast or one-to-many communication has received much attention in the last few years due to the significant bandwidth savings it promises, and the challenges it presents. Consider the multicast extension of the Internet, or IP multicast, as an example. When multiple clients are requesting the same media stream, IP multicast reduce network resource usage by transmitting only one copy of the stream down shared links, instead of one per session sharing the link. Nevertheless, besides the many practical difficulties in supporting IP multicast for the wide-area Internet, the basic properties of multicast communication present a number of challenges to streaming media systems. First and foremost is the problem of heterogeneity: different receivers experience different channel conditions and may have conflicting requirements, e.g. in terms of maximum bit-rate that can be supported, and the amount of error protection needed. Heterogeneity is typically solved by using multiple multicast to provide choices for the receivers. For instance, it is possible to establish different multicasts for different ranges of intended bit-rates [47]. Alternatively, the different multicasts can contain incremental information [22, 48]. A second challenge that multicast presents is the more restricted choice for error control. While retransmission has been the error control mechanism of choice for many streaming applications, its applicability in multicast has been limited by a number of challenges. Using IP multicast for retransmission, for instance, requires that both the retransmission request and the actual retransmission be transmitted to all the receivers in the multicast, an obviously inefficient solution. Even when retransmissions are handled by unicast communication, scalability concerns still remain, since a single sender will have to handle the requests of potentially many receivers.

End-to-End Security and Transcoding

Encryption of media is an effective tool to protect content from eavesdroppers. Transcoding at intermediate nodes within a network is also an important technique to adapt compressed media streams for particular client capabilities or network conditions. Nevertheless, network transcoding poses a serious threat to the end-to-end security because transcoding encrypted streams generally requires decrypting the stream, transcoding the decrypted stream, and then re-encrypting the result. Each transcoding node presents a possible breach to the security of the system. This problem can be overcome by Secure Scalable Streaming (SSS) which enables downstream transcoding without decryption [49,50]. SSS uses jointly designed scalable coding and progressive encryption techniques to encode and encrypt video into secure scalable packets that are transmitted across the network. These packets can be transcoded at intermediate, possibly untrusted, network nodes by simply truncating or discarding packets and without compromising the end-to-end security of the system. The secure scalable packets have unencrypted headers that provide hints, such as optimal truncation points, which the downstream transcoders use to achieve rate-distortion (R-D) optimal fine-grain transcoding across the encrypted packets.

Streaming over Wired and Wireless Links

When the streaming path involves both wired and wireless links, some additional challenges evolve. The first challenge involves the much longer packet delivery time with the addition of a wireless link. Possible causes for the long delay include the employment of FEC with interleaving. For instance, round-trip propagation delay in the 3G wireless system is in the order of 100 ms even before link-level retransmission. With link-level retransmission, the delay for the wireless link alone can be significant. The long round-trip delay reduces the efficiency of a number of end-to-end error control mechanisms: the practical number of end-to-end retransmissions is reduced, and the effectiveness of schemes employing RPS and NewPred is also reduced. The second challenge is the difficulty in inferring network conditions from end-to-end measurements. In high-speed wired networks, packet corruption is so rare that packet loss is a good indication of network congestion, the proper reaction of which is congestion control. In wireless networks however, packet losses may be due to corruption in the packet, which calls for stronger channel coding. Since any end-to-end measurements contain aggregate statistics across both the wired and wireless links, it is difficult to identify the proper cause and therefore perform the proper reaction.




Handbook of Video Databases. Design and Applications
Handbook of Video Databases: Design and Applications (Internet and Communications)
ISBN: 084937006X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393

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