NUS/OzU Streaming Media Group

We are tackling fundamental open problems in media streaming research

Abdelhak Bentaleb, Prof. Roger Zimmermann, School of Computing, NUS
Sevket Arisu, Prof. Ali C. Begen, Computer Science Department, OzU

About us

The NUS/OzU Streaming Media Group forms part of the Media Management Research LAB , School of Computing at National University of Singapore (NUS) and Multimedia Research Group, Computer Science Department at Özyeğin University. Our research addresses the theoretical foundations and practical applications of media streaming. We are focused on discovering and proposing the fundamental principles, algorithms and implementations for solving adaptive video streaming problems involving adaptive bitrate (ABR).

Projects

In this project, we present state-of-the-art bitrate adaptation algorithms for HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) over the last several years.

ABR Scheme Classification.




In streaming media, it is imperative to deliver a good viewer experience to preserve customer loyalty. Prior research shows that this is rather diffcult when shared Internet resources struggle to meet the demand from streaming clients that are largely designed to behave in their own self-interest. To date, several schemes for adaptive streaming have been proposed to address this challenge with varying success. In this project, we take a different approach and develop a game theoretic approach. We present a practical implementation integrated in the dash.js reference player and provide substantial comparisons against the state-of-the-art methods using trace-driven and real-world experiments. Our approach outperforms its competitors in the average viewer experience by 38.5%, and in video stability by 62%.

GTA Overview.




HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is being adopted with increasing frequency and becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming. However, the client-driven, on-off adaptation behavior of HAS results in uneven bandwidth competition and this is exacerbated when a large number of clients share the same bottleneck network link and compete for the available bandwidth. With HAS each client independently strives to maximize its individual share of the available bandwidth, which leads to bandwidth competition and a decrease in end-user quality of experience (QoE). The competition causes scalability issues, which are quality instability, unfair bandwidth sharing and network resource underutilization. In this project, we propose a new software defined networking (SDN) based dynamic resource allocation and management architecture for HAS delivery systems, which aims to alleviate these scalability issues and improve the per-client QoE.

SDN-based ABR Overview.




Originally proposed by Google, QUIC is a low-latency transport protocol currently being developed and specified in the IETF. QUIC's low-latency, improved congestion control, multiplexing features are promising and may help improve viewer experience in HTTP adaptive streaming applications. To investigate what issues due to running HTTP over TCP can be alleviated by using HTTP over QUIC. In this project, we measured QUIC's streaming performance on wireless and cellular networks. Specifically, we examined QUIC’s performance during network interface changes due to viewer's mobility and under unstable network conditions. Results show that QUIC starts media streams more quickly, providing a better streaming and seeking experience, in particular, when there is more congestion in the network, and outperforms TCP when the viewer is mobile and switches between the networks.

Streaming Over QUIC Player Design Overview.




HTTP adaptive streaming with chunked transfer encoding can be used to offer low-latency streaming without sacrificing the coding efficiency. While this allows a media segment to be generated and delivered at the same time, which is critical in reducing the latency, the conventional bitrate adaptation schemes make often grossly inaccurate bandwidth measurements due to the presence of idle periods between the chunks. These wrong measurements cause the streaming client to make bad adaptation decisions. To this end, in this porject, we designed a new bitrate adaptation schemes for low-latency chunked streaming.

Low-Latency Chunked Streaming ABR Overview.

Publications

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous, and R. Zimmermann.
Game of Streaming Players: Is Consensus Viable or an Illusion?.
In ACM Transactions on Multimedia Comput., Communi., and Applicat. (ACM TOMM), 2019

@inproceedings{GTAC2019,
 title={Game of Streaming Players: Is Consensus Viable or an Illusion?},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In ACM Transactions on Multimedia Comput., Communi., and Applicat. (ACM TOMM)},
 year={2019},
 organization={ACM},
}

A. Bentaleb, B. Taani, A. Begen, C. Timmermer, and R. Zimmermann.
A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media over HTTP.
In IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (IEEE COMST), 2018

@inproceedings{ABRSurvey2018,
 title={A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media over HTTP},
 author={A. Bentaleb, B. Taani, A. Begen, C. Timmermer, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (IEEE COMST)},
 year={2018},
 organization={IEEE},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann.
ORL-SDN: Online Reinforcement Learning for SDN-Enabled HTTP Adaptive Streaming.
In ACM Transactions on Multimedia Comput., Communi., and Applicat. (ACM TOMM), 2018

@inproceedings{ORLSDN2018,
 title={ORL-SDN: Online Reinforcement Learning for SDN-Enabled HTTP Adaptive Streaming},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In ACM Transactions on Multimedia Comput., Communi., and Applicat. (ACM TOMM)},
 year={2018},
 organization={ACM},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann.
QoE-Aware Bandwidth Broker for HTTP Adaptive Streaming Flows in an SDN-Enabled HFC Network.
In IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (IEEE TBC), 2018

@inproceedings{BMS2018,
 title={QoE-Aware Bandwidth Broker for HTTP Adaptive Streaming Flows in an SDN-Enabled HFC Network},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting (IEEE TBC)},
 year={2018},
 organization={IEEE},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, R. Zimmermann, and S. Harous.
SDNHAS: An SDN-Enabled Architecture to Optimize QoE in HTTP Adaptive Streaming.
In IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM), 2017

@inproceedings{SDNHAS2017,
 title={SDNHAS: An SDN-Enabled Architecture to Optimize QoE in HTTP Adaptive Streaming},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM)},
 year={2017},
 organization={IEEE},
}



A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann.
Bandwidth Prediction in Low-latency Chunked Streaming.
In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV '19), 2019.
DASH-IF DASH-IF Excellence in DASH Award (1st place)

@inproceedings{ACTE2019,
 title={Bandwidth Prediction in Low-latency Chunked Streaming},
 author={A. Bentaleb, C. Timmerer, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In of the 29th ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV'19)},
 year={2019},
 organization={ACM},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous and R. Zimmermann.
A Distributed Approach for Bitrate Selection in HTTP Adaptive Streaming.
In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM on Multimedia Conference (ACM MM'18), 2018 [Oral]

@inproceedings{FDCHAS2018,
 title={A Distributed Approach for Bitrate Selection in HTTP Adaptive Streaming},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM on Multimedia Conference (ACM MM'18)},
 year={2018},
 organization={ACM},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann.
Game Theory Based Bitrate Adaptation for dash.js Reference Player.
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME'18), 2018 [GC on DASH]
DASH-IF Grand Challenge on DASH (1st place)

@inproceedings{GTADemo2018,
 title={Game Theory Based Bitrate Adaptation for dash.js Reference Player},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME'18)},
 year={2018},
 organization={IEEE},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous, and R. Zimmermann.
Want to Play DASH? A Game Theoretic Approach for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.
In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys'18), 2018 [Oral]
Best Student-paper Award
DASH-IF DASH-IF Excellence in DASH Award (1st place)

@inproceedings{GTA2018,
 title={Want to Play DASH? A Game Theoretic Approach for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, S. Harous, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys'18)},
 year={2018},
 organization={ACM},
}

S. Arisu, and A. Begen.
Quickly Starting Media Streams Using QUIC.
In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV'18), 2018 [Oral]

@inproceedings{QUIC2018,
 title={Quickly Starting Media Streams Using QUIC},
 author={S. Arisu, and A. Begen},
 booktitle={In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV'18)},
 year={2018},
 organization={ACM},
}

A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann.
SDNDASH: Improving QoE of HTTP Adaptive Streaming using Software Defined Networking.
In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (ACM MM'16), 2016 [Oral]

@inproceedings{SDNDASH2016,
 title={SDNDASH: Improving QoE of HTTP Adaptive Streaming using Software Defined Networking},
 author={A. Bentaleb, A. Begen, and R. Zimmermann},
 booktitle={In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (ACM MM'16)},
 year={2016},
 organization={ACM},
}

Team

Abdelhak Bentaleb

SoC, National University of Singapore

Roger Zimmermann

SoC, National University of Singapore

Ali C. Begen

Ozyegin University, Networked Media

Sevket Arisu

Ozyegin University, Turkcell

Acknowledgments