Sammendrag
In this thesis we have investigated a selection of promising
scheduling techniques for periodic broadcasting. As ISPs are upgrading
their networks to support multicast, they see the opportunity to use
less resources to offer their customers quality VoD by making use of
efficient scheduling techniques. Of the techniques studied, we found
the Cautious Harmonic Broadcasting (CHB) algorithm to be most
promising.
CHB is designed to schedule video streams over a multicast
network. Reduced transmission bandwidth is one of the benefits of
using this algorithm. Our most important contribution was designing a
CHB streaming server and client, and implementing a prototype of each.
Our server prototype has successfully put the CHB algorithm into
practice.
In our implementation we used the live555 framework, enabling future
integration with open source media players like VLC and MPlayer. In
our assessment of the prototypes we have performed a series of tests
to evaluate the performance. We suggest that conflicting use of
variable and constant bit rates can be one factor that can interfere
with the CHB scheduling. We also observed that the temporally aligned
scheduling scheme in CHB can result in duplicate or lost video frames.
From our work we can conclude that it is feasible with today's
technology to put a CHB streaming server into operation for a number
of subscribers.
In this thesis we have investigated a selection of promising
scheduling techniques for periodic broadcasting. As ISPs are upgrading
their networks to support multicast, they see the opportunity to use
less resources to offer their customers quality VoD by making use of
efficient scheduling techniques. Of the techniques studied, we found
the Cautious Harmonic Broadcasting (CHB) algorithm to be most
promising.
CHB is designed to schedule video streams over a multicast
network. Reduced transmission bandwidth is one of the benefits of
using this algorithm. Our most important contribution was designing a
CHB streaming server and client, and implementing a prototype of each.
Our server prototype has successfully put the CHB algorithm into
practice.
In our implementation we used the live555 framework, enabling future
integration with open source media players like VLC and MPlayer. In
our assessment of the prototypes we have performed a series of tests
to evaluate the performance. We suggest that conflicting use of
variable and constant bit rates can be one factor that can interfere
with the CHB scheduling. We also observed that the temporally aligned
scheduling scheme in CHB can result in duplicate or lost video frames.
From our work we can conclude that it is feasible with today's
technology to put a CHB streaming server into operation for a number
of subscribers.