Improving Packet Latencies of Live Streams in Wired Networks

Improving Packet Latencies of Live Streams in Wired Networks

by Arijit Ghosh (Advisor: Prof. Tony Givargis)
Date: July 9, 2008

Live streaming is becoming increasingly popular. In a study published in January 2008, Cisco predicted that Internet-to-TV video will account for 30% of all Internet traffic. If all kinds of video traffic are considered, then it will be 90% of consumer traffic by 2012. We distinguish live streams from on demand streams. Live streams are sent as the data is being generated, is typically of long duration, requires high bandwidth and associated with flash crowd behavior. As such, live streams place tremendous demand on network resources.

In this thesis, we proposed network techniques to improve packet latencies of live streams in wired networks. In particular, we made the following contributions. First, we proposed a technique that allows multicasting at the access network, the proverbial last mile which presents tremendous bandwidth limitations. Second, we reduced nodal processing by a tunelling scheme based on source routing. Essentially, using routing computed at source and a novel network encoding scheme, we eliminated intermediate processing. Third, we presented a queueing algorithm that schedules packets based on application deadlines, reduces the number of sorting iterations, thereby improving performance, has low complexity, exhibits good fairness and provides a bounded delay for a single packet that is independent of the number of flows. Finally, we proposed a variation of QoS routing that works with only partial network state information.