Joint online transcoding and geo-distributed delivery for dynamic adaptive streaming

Abstract

Dynamic adaptive video streaming has emerged as a popular approach for video streaming in today's Internet. To date the two important components in dynamic adaptive streaming, video transcoding which generates the adaptive bitrates of a video and video delivery which streams the videos to users, have been separately studied, resulting in a huge waste of computation and storage resource due to transcoding useless videos and suboptimal streaming quality due to homogeneous video replication. In this paper, we propose to jointly perform video transcoding and video delivery for adaptive streaming in an online manner. We conduct extensive measurement studies of a video sharing system and a CDN to motivate our design. We formulate and solve optimization problems to enable high streaming quality for the users, and low computation and replication costs for the system. In particular, our design connects video transcoding and video delivery based on users' preferences of CDN regions and regional preferences of video versions. Extensive trace-driven experiments further confirm the superiority of our design. © 2014 IEEE.