Minimizing the In-Cloud Bandwidth for On-Demand Reactive and Proactive Streaming Applications

Abstract

Video streaming services are one of the most resource-consuming applications on the Internet. Thus, minimizing the consumed resources at runtime in general and the server/network bandwidth in particular are still challenging for researchers. Currently, most streaming techniques used on the Internet open one stream per client request, which makes the consumed bandwidth increases linearly. Hence, many broadcasting/streaming protocols have been proposed in the literature to minimize the streaming bandwidth. These protocols can be divided into two main categories, namely, reactive and proactive broadcasting protocols. While the first category is recommended for streaming unpopular videos, the second category is recommended for streaming popular videos. In this context, in this paper we propose an enhanced version of the reactive protocol Slotted Stream Tapping (SST) called Share All SST (SASST), which we prove to further reduce the streaming bandwidth with regard to SST. We also propose a new proactive protocol named the New Optimal Proactive Protocol (NOPP) based on an optimal scheduling of video segments on streaming-channel. SASST and NOPP are to be used in cloud and CDN (content delivery network) networks where the IP multicast or multicast HTTP on QUIC could be enabled, as their key principle is to allow the sharing of ongoing streams among clients requesting the same video content. Thus, clients and servers are often services running on virtual machines or in containers belonging to the same cloud or CDN infrastructure.