Chunked video streaming over OF@TEIN SDN Cloud Playground With Wired And Wireless Links

Abstract

This thesis has designed and developed the middle-box and splitting functionalities for chunked RTP video streaming as well as video file pre-transferring mechanism over multiple concurrent paths over OF@TEIN SDN (software-defined network) cloud playground with wired and wireless links. All testbed scenarios have been constructed in actual over local and international networks in three countries: South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand. Experimental results include the evaluation of subjective video quality, packet loss ratio and packet delay. In summary, this thesis has three main contributions as follows. Firstly, the proposed chunked video streaming system has been tested in both Open vSwitch-enabled Mininet-emulated network testbed and actual OF@TEIN SDN cloud playground testbed which includes OpenStack, Open vSwitch and SmartX box. The obtained experimental results show that the multi-path video streaming method is effective when the capacity of the main path alone is not enough to carry the whole incoming packets of video stream and the employed video packet chunk splitting ratio decomposes the incoming packet rate to match the capacity of available paths. However, this multi-path video streaming method should not be used when the main path capacity already suffices for transmitting the incoming packets of video stream. This is because the middle-box combining in real-time the arriving packets over multiple paths would incur additional packet delay due to its hardware limitation. Secondly, to reduce real-time middle-box processing and to enable multi-path capacity usage, this thesis has proposed to combine the multi-path file transferring function and Tsunami protocol. The principle is in transferring beforehands the large 4k video file from the Tsunami file transfer server in South Korea to Thailand’s SmartX box by using chunked video file transferring via multiple paths. And within the Thailand’s SmartX box, a local video server is responsible for streaming out in real-time the 4k video to the client in Thailand. The test results show that the proposed mechanism can take as low as 23.51-72.20 seconds in transferring the 10-minute 4k video file and can utilize the multi-path capacity effectively in serving the video streaming client. Finally, this thesis has constructed a testbed to experiment on the adaptive-path chunked video streaming over OF@TEIN international-scaled wired network and OF@Chula-EE laboratory-scaled wireless network. Adaptivity of utilized path is necessary due to the handover process of Wi-Fi user in Thailand from the old to new Wi-Fi access points. These access points have been installed the OpenWRT-based Open vSwitch, which communicates with the remote OpenFlow controller in South Korea. Such handover process has been demonstrated in this research with the continuous measurement of Wi-Fi channel quality, a partially redundant chunked video pre-transferring mechanism to reduce the received video quality degradation during the handover and a wireless-path changing mechanism that must work across administrative domains between South Korea and Thailand. This demonstrating experiment will serve as the basis for future wireless SDN video streaming cloud research.