Dynamic mobile server for live casting applications

Abstract

Live casting applications have become a popular trend in the evolution of the Internet. The increasing number of clients worldwide has made the conventional point-to-point client-server delivery method obsolete in supporting these applications. Point-to-point delivery uses unicast transmission which consumes high bandwidth as multiple duplicated streams are transmitted to clients who request for the same content. An increasing number of clients are translated directly into an increase of server workload and server network traffic. Because of that, end users suffered from bad quality of experience. In this research, Dynamic Mobile Server (DMS), a generic end-user platform of delivery mechanism has been developed to address these problems. This platform is designed to support multiple live casting applications compared to current infrastructure Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Peer to Peer (P2P) which only support live video streaming application. This mechanism consists of a web application system (application layer approach) which also involves server mobility and traffic redirection concept. Duplicated connections are minimized by confining the traffic in Local Area Network (LAN). In order to guarantee the scalability of the system, DMS uses IP multicast to stream the video in LAN. Compared to the conventional point-to-point delivery, proof-of-concept implementation (prototype) experiment results show that DMS double the bandwidth availability, and maintains excellent video quality with Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) more than 80. Despite of the congested traffic in the network, DMS had proofed to maintain the average start-up latency to only one second.