Emulation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP with Mininet

Emulation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over
HTTP with Mininet
Anatoliy Zabrovskiy
Evgeny Kuzmin
Petrozavodsk State University

Video streaming
Video streaming is becoming more and more popular
technology for media content delivery over the Internet.
Streaming protocols:
• HLS (from Apple)
• RTMP (from Adobe)
• RTSP
• HDS
• Smooth (from Microsoft)
• DASH

MPEG-DASH
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also
known as MPEG-DASH, is the first bit rate adaptive HTTP
based solution which became an international standard in
2012.
YouTube and Netflix have started deploying MPEG-DASH
which means that the format will play an important role in
streaming.
The advantage of using HTTP is that the ordinary web servers
with a caching capability can be used for streaming video.

MPEG-DASH
How to test new algorithms and Dash-based services?
Which Emulator to use?

MPEG-DASH and Mininet
MPEG-DASH will soon be more actively used in real systems
along with such new technologies and approaches as:
• Software-Defined Networking (SDN),
• Content Delivery Network (CDN),
• Content-Centric Networking (CCN).
With this in mind, we decided to estimate the delivery efficacy
of real MPEG-DASH traffic through Mininet.

Research goals
• Developing methodology for setting Mininet virtual
environment with bandwidth shaping functionality.
• Developing experimental setup which interconnects two
parts: a virtual environment established with Mininet and a
real IP-network.
• Conducting experiments of transmitting MPEG-DASH
content via Mininet and via the specialized emulation
equipment Linktropy 5500 under a number of traffic shaping
scenarios. Comparing the results.

Methodology and experimental setup
MININET - Open-Source Routing and Network Emulator
 Mininet is capable of building realistic virtual topologies
consisting of numerous network elements, such as end
hosts, switches, routers and communication links.
 Mininet implements a concept of Software-Defined
Networking (SDN)
 Mininet allows specification of bandwidth limits as well as
delay, loss and max queue length for each communication
link.
 It allows emulation of CDN or CCN network paradigms.

DASH content generation
www.bitcodin.com
4.0 Mbps, 3.0 Mbps, .. , 0.5 Mbps

Mininet and network parameters

Mininet and network parameters
192.168.1.1
192.168.1.254 192.168.2.254
192.168.2.1

Mininet and bandwidth shaping
[
{
"time": 0,
"type": "editLink",
"params": {
"link": "link",
"bw": 1
}
},
{
"time": 31,
….
]
events.json
By utilizing Minievents framework
(https://github.com/cgiraldo/minievent)
our program is capable of tuning link
characteristics at specified moments in
time
events.json

Client side
(Web-based management interface with Media Player)

Each second store
videoBitrate of
playing segment
Client side
(Web-based management interface with Media Player)

Experiments
The number of conducted experiments: 50. The duration of each experiment: 120 sec.
For all experiments, bandwidth values for the communication channel (link1) varied
according to the predefined scenario.
Each 30 seconds the bandwidth changed in the following sequence: 1 Mbps, 2 Mbps, 3
Mbps and 1 Mbps.
All videoBitrate values were divided into four categories with 1500 samples in each.
1 Mbps (from 1 to 30 sec),
2 Mbps (from 31 to 60 sec),
3 Mbps (from 61 to 90 sec) and
1 Mbps (from 91 to 120 sec).
Such a pattern of bandwidth shaping
inevitably caused the bit rate switch of various
DASH-based streams.

Results
• To evaluate the relevance of the results obtained with Mininet, we repeated
the same set of experiments with specialized equipment (Linktropy 5500 ).
• Figure depicts averaged videoBitrate values for both network emulators.
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
4000
4500
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120
VideoBitrate[kbps]
Time [Seconds]
Mininet, Linktropy, currently played video segment
Mininet, currently
played video segment
Linktropy, currently
played video segment

Results. Student’s t-test
• We compared experimentally acquired values for videoBitrate groups within
Mininet setting to similar categories obtained with Linktropy 5500 by
applying Student’s t-test.
• The first group of values resulted from Mininet experiments was compared
to the first group from Linktropy 5500 and so on.
• We formulated a null hypothesis H0 about the equity of two expectations.
All four empirical values te are less than Student’s t-critical value under the
chosen significance level (p = 0.05).
The difference between average values from Mininet and Linktropy 5500
groups is insignificant under the selected t-parameters.

Conclusion
• We investigated how to deliver DASH-based content
through Mininet environment.
• Developed experimental setup which interconnects two
parts: a virtual environment established with Mininet and a
real IP-network.
• We conducted experiments of transmitting DASH content
via Mininet and via the specialized emulation equipment
Linktropy 5500 under a number of traffic shaping scenarios.
Compared the results.

Future plans
In our future research we are planning to incorporate more
complex network topologies within Mininet environment.

Future plans
Developing tools and methodology for testing and analyzing the DASH-
based content delivery in the context of modern network approaches.
• To explore promising connections between MPEG-DASH and modern
network approaches and paradigms (SDN, CDN, CCN);
• To design and develop network emulation profiles (test profiles) for new
network approaches ; and
• To incorporate the designed network test profiles and tools in the EmStream
system.

Thank you for your attention!
Anatoliy Zabrovskiy,
z_anatoliy@petrsu.ru
Evgeny Kuzmin,
kuzmin@petrsu.ru

Emulation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP with Mininet

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