Abstract

Recent advancements in video and audio codec technologies (e.g., RealVideo [18]) make multimedia streaming possible across a wide range of network conditions. With an increasing trend of ubiquitous connectivity, more and more areas have overlapping coverage of multiple wired and wireless networks. Because the best network service changes as the user moves, to provide good multimedia application performance, the service needs to adapt to user movement as well as network and computational resource variations. For wireless multimedia applications, one must ensure smooth transitions when network connectivity changes. We argue that network adaptations for multimedia applications should be provided at the application layer with help from proxies in the network. The reasons are ease of programming, ease of deployment, better faulttolerance, and greater scalability. We propose a self-adaptive distributed proxy system that provides streaming multimedia service to mobile wireless clients. Our system intelligently adapts to the real-time network variations and hides handoff artifacts using application protocol specific knowledge whenever possible. It also uses application-independent techniques such as dynamic relocation of transcoders and automatic insertion of forward error correction and compression into the data transcoding path. We advocate a composable, relocatable transcoding data path consisting of a directed acyclic graph of stronglytyped operators to bridge any data format mismatch between the client and the data source. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of our system in the context of streaming video playback involving a series of transcoding proxies and a mobile client.

Citations