10. Streaming Media Content Delivery Networks


10. Streaming Media Content Delivery Networks

The Internet has rapidly emerged as a mechanism for users to find and retrieve content, originally for webpages and recently for streaming media. Content delivery networks (CDNs) were originally developed to overcome performance problems for delivery of static web content (webpages). These problems include network congestion and server overload, which arise when many users access popular content. CDNs improve end-user performance by caching popular content on edge servers located closer to users. This provides a number of advantages. First, it helps prevent server overload, since the replicated content can be delivered to users from edge servers. Furthermore, since content is delivered from the closest edge server and not from the origin server, the content is sent over a shorter network path, thus reducing the request response time, the probability of packet loss, and the total network resource usage. While CDNs were originally intended for static web content, recently, they are being designed for delivery of streaming media as well.

10.1 Streaming Media CDN Design

A streaming media CDN is a CDN that is explicitly designed to deliver streaming media, as opposed to static webpages. Streaming media CDN design and operation is similar in many ways to conventional (webpage) CDN design and operation. For example, there are three key problems that arise in general CDN design and operation. The first is the server placement problem: Given N servers, where should these servers be placed on the network? The second problem is the content distribution problem: On which servers should each piece of content be replicated? The third problem is the server selection problem: For each request, which is the optimal server to direct the client to for delivery of the content?

Many aspects of a streaming media CDN are also quite different from a conventional CDN. For example, client-server interaction for a conventional (webpage) CDN involves a short-lived (fraction of a second) HTTP/TCP session(s). However, a streaming session generally has a long duration (measured in minutes) and uses RTSP and RTP/UDP. While congestion and packet loss may lead to a few second delay in delivering a webpage and is often acceptable, the corresponding effect on a streaming media session would be an interruption (stall or visual artifacts) that can be highly distracting. Clearly, delay, packet loss, and any form of interruption can have a much more detrimental effect on video streaming then on static webpage delivery. In addition, in a conventional CDN each piece of content (webpage) is relatively small, on the order of 10's of kilobytes, and therefore it can be replicated in its entirety on each chosen server. However, streaming media, such as movies, have a long duration and require a significant amount of storage, on the order of megabytes or gigabytes, and therefore it is often not practical or desirable to replicate an entire video stream on each chosen server. Instead, the video can be partitioned into parts, and only a portion of each video is cached on each server. There are many interesting problems related to caching of video, e.g. see [51] and references therein.

Two other capabilities that are important for streaming media CDN, and are of lesser importance for a conventional CDN for webpage distribution, are multicast and server hand-off. Multicast is clearly a highly desirable capability for streaming of popular media. While wide-area IP Multicast is currently not available in the Internet, a streaming media CDN can be explicitly designed to provide this capability via application-layer multicast: the infrastructure in the streaming media CDN provide an overlay on the Internet and are used as the nodes for the multicast tree. Communication between nodes employs only simple ubiquitous IP service, thereby avoiding the dependence of IP multicast. Another important capability is hand-off between streaming servers. Because streaming media sessions are long lived, it is sometimes required to perform a midstream hand-off from one streaming server to another. This functionality is not required for webpage delivery where the sessions are very short in duration. Furthermore, when the streaming session involves transcoding, mid-stream hand-off of the transcoding session is also required between servers [52].

10.2 Multiple Description Streaming Media CDN (MD-CDN)

CDNs have been widely used to provide low latency, scalability, fault tolerance, and load balancing for the delivery of web content and more recently streaming media. Another important advantage offered by streaming media CDNs is their distributed infrastructure. The distributed infrastructure of a CDN can be used to explicitly achieve path diversity between each client and multiple nearby edge servers. Furthermore, appropriately coupling MD coding with this path diversity can provide improved reliability to packet losses, link outages, and server failures. This system is referred to as a Multiple Description Streaming Media Content Delivery Network [43] or an MD-CDN for short.

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Figure 34.5: An MD-CDN uses MD coding and path diversity to provide improved reliability for packet losses, link outages, and server failures.

An MD-CDN operates in the following manner: (1) MD coding is used to code a media stream into multiple complementary descriptions, (2) the different descriptions are distributed across different edge servers in the CDN, (3) when a client requests a media stream, it is directed to multiple nearby servers that host complementary descriptions, and (4) the client simultaneously receives the different complementary descriptions through different network paths from different servers. That is, the existing CDN infrastructure is exploited to achieve path diversity between multiple servers and each client. In this way, disruption in streaming media occurs only in the less likely case when simultaneous losses afflict both paths. This architecture also reaps the benefits associated with CDNs, such as reduced response time to clients, load balancing across servers, robustness to network and server failures, and scalability to number of clients.

Further information about MD-CDN design and operation is available in [43]. Other related works include distributing MD coded data in peer-to-peer networks [53], streaming a conventional single description stream to a single client from multiple servers [54], and the use of Tornado codes and multiple servers to reduce download time for bulk data (not video) transfer [55].




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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