Network support for emerging multimedia streaming services

Abstract

Emerging streaming services are increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. They enrich a seemingly mundane everyday activity to a unique, personal experience: talking on the phone assisted by a visual, having access to live as well as past TV programs, and watching videos out of virtually unlimited choices. Especially, Internet TV (IPTV), as one of the hottest new technologies in telecommunications, is considered a crucial revenue source by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Despite the excitement, these streaming services introduce a number of challenges for today`s backbone providers. A fundamental challenge is how to evaluate the existing backbone and design an extremely reliable and cost-effective streaming infrastructure? This dissertation focuses on the network design of large-scale streaming services within a single network domain and the understanding of content and user behavior. It first develops design techniques for robust and economical streaming network infrastructure, in particular, for IP unicast and large-scale IP multicast TV. It makes efficient use of the rich underlying path diversity to protect against frequent network faults and disruptions. For IPTV service, which is bandwidth-intensive and thus is much more challenging, it proposes a novel Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model, which advances the state-of-the-art IPTV designs. Next, to understand the user behavior in real systems and their implications, this dissertation analyzes TV viewing habits of a quarter million users from one of the largest IPTV networks in the world. It demonstrates the scalability limitations of the current multicast-based IPTV architecture, under increasing amount of content and channels and more interactive and asynchronous viewing patterns. As a next-generation IPTV network design, it studies Telco-managed peer-to-peer (P2P) TV architecture, where P2P distributed system is integrated into TV set-top boxes and Telco has explicit control over whi...