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Efficient delivery of streaming interactive video

Jayanta Kumar Dey, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

The ability to record and/or transmit voice and moving images (i.e., continuous media) has had enormous impact on twentieth century societies. On the Internet, the popular new communication medium, video is becoming an increasingly popular means for conveying news and information, tele-lectures, enhancing chat groups and discussion forums, as well as enhancing user home pages. The focus of this dissertation is on video delivery systems that deliver data from a server to clients across a high speed network. In particular, we study some issues that arise in efficiently providing video playback and VCR like interactive control functionality in video delivery systems. In the first part of the dissertation, we study the problem of constant-bitrate (CBR) transport of variable-bit-rate (VBR) video. We examine several structural properties exhibited by the tradeoffs between resources such as the CBR transmission rate, the buffer requirements at the client, and the transmission time, and the delay in starting playback of a video. We present an efficient algorithm to compute the minimum client buffer required to transmit a VBR video using CBR transport. We find that delaying the playback of a VBR video by even a few seconds can significantly reduce the CBR transmission rate and client buffer requirements. In the second part of the dissertation, we focus on the problem of provisioning VCR like functionalities of Fast Forward, Rewind and Pause, in the context of delivering CBR video. We discuss several techniques for providing these functionalities and find that providing VCR functionalities with statistical guarantees ensures that clients receive good quality service while resources at the server are used efficiently. In the third part of the dissertation, we address the problem of restarting playback of VBR video at the end of an interactive operation, using playback techniques that reduce the variability of the video. We develop and evaluate algorithms to restart playback at the end of an interactive operation. We then examine the performance of these algorithms in a video server under different server bandwidth allocation policies. We find that it is possible to restart playback of VBR video with low latencies.

Subject Area

Computer science

Recommended Citation

Dey, Jayanta Kumar, "Efficient delivery of streaming interactive video" (1998). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9823730.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9823730

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