Scalable and cost-effective framework for continuous media-on-demand
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2006
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This dissertation was motivated by the exponential growth in bandwidth capacity
of the Internet, coupled with the immense growth of broadband adoption by the
public. This has led to the development of a wide variety of new online services.
Chief amongst the emerging applications is the delivery of multimedia contents to
the end users via the network on-demand. It is the “on-demand” aspect that has led
to problems which, despite the advances in hardware technology and network capacity,
have hampered wide scale adoption of multimedia delivery. The focus of this
dissertation was to address these problems, namely: scalability, cost-effectiveness,
and network quality of service for timely presentation of multimedia contents.
We proposed an architecture, which we referred to as “Delayed-Multicast”, to
address the scalability problem. The new architecture introduced buffers within
the network to reduce demands on core network bandwidth and server load. A
feasibility study of the architecture was conducted through the use of a prototype.
It was found that such a system is within reach by demonstrating the prototype using
cheap, common-of-the-shelf (COTS) components, and with help of freely available
system software such Linux with real-time support.
The introduction of buffers within the network led to the requirement of how
to minimize buffer space. We developed an optimal algorithm for allocating buffer
space in a single level caching layout (i.e. only one buffer in the transmission path
from the server to the end user).
For the case of multi-levels network caching, we thoroughly examined different
optimization problems from an algorithmic perspective. These problems included
how to minimize total system memory, and minimize the maximum memory used
per node. We proved that determining the optimal buffer allocation in many of these
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cases is an NP-complete problem. Consequently, we developed heuristics to handle
multi-level caching and showed through simulations that the heuristics greatly help
in minimizing buffer space and network bandwidth requirement.
An important aspect of the heuristics was how to handle the case when the
arrival times of client requests were not known a priori. For these “online” problems
we also proposed heuristics that can significantly reduce overall system resource
requirements. If the cost of buffer space was also taken into account along with the
cost of network bandwidth, a different optimization problem was how to minimize
the total system cost. Here, we also proposed heuristics, which in simulations show
that the total system cost can be significantly reduced.
Besides the problems associated with resource allocation, in terms of buffer space
and bandwidth, we also examined the problem of how to provision the necessary
network quality of service on-demand. Most current networks rely on best-effort
delivery which is ill suited for the delivery of multimedia traffic. We proposed a
solution which relied on the use of a programmable network plane, that is present in
many current routers, to dynamically alter the priority of flows within the network
in real-time. We also demonstrated the effectiveness of the flow prioritization on an
actual Nortel router.
Finally, we examined the problem of how to admit and achieve fair bandwidth
allocation for the end-users within a Differentiated Service (DiffServ) network. Diff-
Serv is an IETF standard that aims to provide a “better than best-effort” network
in a scalable manner, and is used widely, especially within the same autonomous domain
for prioritization different classes of traffic. However, there are open problems
on how to provide fair bandwidth allocation amongst competing flows. We proposed
an edge-aware resource discovery loop, which as the name suggests, sent packets to
gather information about the internal states of the core network. With this information,
we proposed a price-based admission control algorithm for use within the
DiffServ network that would allow fair admission, effective congestion control, and
fair bandwidth allocation amongst different traffic flows.
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