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Internet TV Architecture Based on Scalable Video Coding

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 Internet TV Architecture
Based on Scalable Video Coding
Pedro G. Moscoso Rui S. Cruz
Instituto Superior Técnico Instituto Superior Técnico
Lisboa, Portugal INESC-ID/INOV
pedro.moscoso@ist.utl.pt Lisboa, Portugal
rui.s.cruz@ist.utl.pt
ABSTRACT
The heterogeneity of the Internet raises several problems to
the distribution of multimedia contents. This paper starts
by introducing those problems and briefly overviewing the
main approaches being used to mitigate them, in order to
present a novel web-based Adaptive Video Streaming so-
lution prototype, supporting Scalable Video Coding (SVC)
techniques. The proposed solution, with focus on the client
side, incorporates quality control mechanisms to maximize
the end user experienced quality, is suitable for Interactive
Internet TV Architectures and cooperative with Content
Distribution Networks (CDNs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web-
streaming environments.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.1 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network
Architecture and Design—Network communications
General Terms
Algorithms, Performance, Measurement
Keywords
Internet video streaming, adaptive streaming, H.264/AVC,
scalable video coding, peer-to-peer
1. INTRODUCTION
The growth and expansion of the broadband Internet and
the increasing number of connected devices with multime-
dia content play-out capabilities, notably the recent hand-
held devices (smartphones, tablets) supporting high defini-
tion video [14], raises several problems to the distribution
of multimedia contents. From the end user device side, a
wide range of networked devices with different characteris-
tics and capabilities, such as screen size and resolution, Cen-
tral Processing Unit (CPU) power, operating system and
media player applications, poses big challenges to the dis-
tribution of contents, hardly scaled for all of those devices.
From the access network provider side, the heterogeneous
Mário S. Nunes
Instituto Superior Técnico
INESC-ID/INOV
Lisboa, Portugal
mario.nunes@inov.pt
nature of connectivity to the Internet does not also guar-
antees uniform and stable conditions of reception at any
moment in time to the end user devices. From the content
producer and/or broadcaster side it is rather important that
multimedia contents reach the end users with the best qual-
ity possible while not wasting precious resources. These situ-
ations have been the main drivers for the techniques recently
developed, that aim to reduce the mentioned problems in or-
der to optimize multimedia distribution and resources usage.
Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Adobe already provide
mechanisms, more or less transparent to the end user, able
to support dynamic variations in video streaming quality
while ensuring support for a plethora of end user devices
and network connections. For these techniques to work, the
original content is re-encoded with different qualities and
bitrates [1, 10, 15].
But, with the SVC extension to the H.264/AVC [13] stan-
dard for video coding, new approaches are possible for video
distribution and consumption as videos can now be encoded
in nested dependent layers corresponding to several hierar-
chical levels of quality (i.e., higher layers refine the quality
of the video of lower layers), not requiring multiple encoded
versions (bitrates/quality levels) of the same content. The
base layer (i.e., the first layer) is required in order for a
SVC video to be decoded and played-out, but this layer cor-
responds to a low definition, H.264/AVC compatible video
with acceptable quality and low bitrate, into which higher
layers, if successfully received, can be added to produce a
higher quality, higher definition video in terms of space (i.e.,
image resolution), time (i.e., frame rate) or Signal-to-Noise
Ratio) (SNR) dimensions. Almost all techniques involving
SVC are based on packetized bitstream transmission meth-
ods. The authors in [5] propose a Raptor coding scheme to
protect the transmission of SVC in order to improve the dis-
tribution of video over lossy networks. A similar approach is
proposed in [16] but with network-assisted adaptive Forward
Error Correction (FEC) scheme. In [11] the authors present
a survey of several P2P systems supporting bitstream mode
SVC. In [4] SVC is combined with Multiple Description
Coding (MDC) to alleviate packet loss in P2P overlay mul-
ticast. A packet scheduling mechanism, also for P2P stream-
ing, is proposed in [7]. A prioritized scheduling mechanism,
but for a chunk-based P2P transmission approach is pro-
posed in [8].
This paper presents and evaluates the architecture of a web-
based Adaptive Video Streaming solution prototype, sup-
porting scalable video coding techniques, suitable for Inter-
active Internet TV Architectures, that aims to maximize
the end user experienced quality. The proposed architec-
ture, being developed by the authors under the scope of the
European Project SARACEN [12], can be seamlessly inte-
grated with web oriented CDNs, allowing the media to get
easily cached along the network, and used in a P2P web-
streaming environment.
Section 2 gives an overview of the proposed architecture,
Section 3 analyses the results from the evaluation of the
prototype and Section 4 concludes the paper.
2. ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW
The Internet TV distribution network architecture considers
end user nodes and serving platforms. The end user nodes
are distributed peers (with P2P capabilities) that can pro-
duce, consume and share contents, offering their resources
(bandwidth, processing power, storing capacity) to other
end user nodes. The serving platforms are centralized ser-
vice nodes providing control (tracker for P2P), content treat-
ment and distribution (transcoders and media servers), as
well as interaction tools and facilities. The architecture is
a multi-source Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client
and server solution providing an advanced form of Web-
Streaming and WebSeeding (HTTP based P2P Streaming
Protocols) [3]. The process used for streaming distribution
relies on a chunk transfer scheme (instead of a bitstream)
whereby the original video data is chopped into small video
chunks with a short duration (of typically two seconds). The
chunk-based streaming protocols allow the deployment of
a distribution network compatible with the Internet infras-
tructure, such as Web caches and CDNs as well as P2P
distribution. The description of the serving platforms of the
Internet TV distribution network will not be covered in this
paper (except for a brief description of the partition sys-
tem), as its focus is on the client side, for a solution able
to consume Video On Demand (VoD) and Live video ser-
vices, supporting multiple device types and resolutions with
adaptive streaming mechanisms based on SVC extension of
H.264/AVC . The overview of the architecture will focus the
following components:
• The Partition system, which will be responsible for
splitting the SVC video files in chunks and then in
several layer files.
• The Adaptation System that requests the video with
maximum possible quality.
• The Reassembler System that rebuilds the video file to
a given level of quality.
• The Media Player that plays the SVC video.
The first component, the Partition system, is typically de-
ployed in a centralized heavy-duty SVCencoder appliance.
The other components are for the end user client.
2.1 Partition system
The Chunk Partitioner (Figure 1) encodes the SVC video
file in a set of independent chunks that can be played in-
dependently, each one with 2 s duration. The chunks are
delimited by Supplemental Enhancement Information (SEI)
Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) units, starting when a
SEI NAL unit appears in the encoded file and ending in the
NAL unit that precedes the next SEI NAL unit. This fea-
ture is the basis for the support of Live video streaming,
as it turns independent of the media timeline the moment
when a user joins the stream (can join at the current time-
line and start watching the stream, in the worst case, after
2 seconds plus the time required to fill the play-out buffer).
The Intra-Chunk Layer Partitioner splits the SVC chunk
Figure 1: Layer creation process
files into several transmission layers, as illustrated in Fig-
ure 1. This process begins with the demultiplexing of the
NALs and with their identification with one ID. This is very
important for the reconstitution of the original bitstream on
the client side. This identification process is done by the in-
sertion of a Sequence Numbering field with 2 bytes between
the start code (0001), and the beginning of the NAL unit
(Figure 2). Layer separation is done by using the three iden-
Figure 2: Identification of NAL order
tifiers: Definition (DID), Quality (QID) and Temporal IDs
(TID) that exist on SVC NALs. After the partition of the
video file in layer files, an index file (Manifest) of the content
is created. The manifest file holds information about the
content, i.e., describes the structure of the media, namely,
the codecs used, the chunks, the number of layers, the audio
component, etc., is a Well-Formed XML Document encoded
as double-byte Unicode.
2.2 Adaptation System
The Adaptation System is responsible for the adjustments in
video quality by determining the number of layers to request
from the serving nodes, based on a set of heuristics related
to network and host system conditions. Network conditions,
such as bandwidth and Round-Trip Time (RTT), are con-
tinuously measured, with their averages used as smoothing
factors to prevent abrupt changes in the quality of the video.
This ensures that the variations between layers are smooth
and causes an almost imperceptible impact on the user view-
ing experience. For the host system condition the heuristics
are related to the Screen Resolution and the CPU Load and
the system always uses the lowest values returned by the
metrics. Additionally, the download time of several layers
of each chunk is also limited to 2 s to prevent pauses and
re-buffering.
2.3 Reassembler System
The Reassembler re-creates the independent video chunk file
from the received layer files (containing several NALs iden-
tified by unique IDs that provide the order of the NAL in
the final video chunk). This video chunk is then sent to the
SVC Media Player. Figure 3 illustrates the reassembly chain
used for P2P or client-server streaming methods.
Figure 3: The SVC reassembly chain
2.4 Client Video Player
The end user client media player can be either a platform-
specific software client to deliver audio-visual content to the
user in a variety of formats, a Web browser plug-in, embed-
ded into an HTML5 document, or a WebApp targeted to
mobile smartphones, providing the user interface and con-
tent playback functionalities. The architecture of the client
provides not only a client side but also a peer serving side.
The client side includes a local HTTP process that also sup-
ports standard client-server downloading and streaming via
HTTP protocol. The local HTTP process listens at a lo-
cal port to redirect HTTP GET or POST methods initiated
from either the local web browser or from the application
Graphical User Interface (GUI), to either the P2P engine
or to the appropriate external Web server, basing its deci-
sion on information taken from the Manifest of the content.
The client media player supports several codecs, including
SVC decoding [9]. As illustrated in Figure 4, the video play-
back can be made directly in the browser video canvas (for
the browser plug-in version) making it easier to integrate
P2P based video delivery into Web based distribution mech-
anisms. The client serving side back-end component is a
Figure 4: Web browser plugin prototype interface
software daemon that embeds the P2P core engine and an
HTTP server to exchange data across the network. Act-
ing as the underlying transport layer for all video and audio
streams as well as accompanying metadata related to the
stream content and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, the
daemon communicates directly with other P2P nodes, ap-
propriate external Web servers, local video codecs, and the
browser plug-in via a standard Javascript API (JSAPI). The
back-end component lets the P2P core engine and the HTTP
server to run in the background regardless if the front-end
interface is running or not.
3. EVALUATION RESULTS
In order to evaluate the prototype solution a network sce-
nario was prepared, using only a client-server mode, on
which the available bandwidth for the client systems could
be artificially adjusted. The HTTP web streaming server
contained the SVC encoded videos, either as stored contents
or as real-time encoded media chunk streams (simulating a
Live TV program), together with the corresponding manifest
files. The web streaming server had public address accessible
from the Internet. The SVC video used on the evaluation,
was encoded with ten layers for two spatial scalability lev-
els, with the first five layers with a Common Intermediate
Format (CIF) resolution and the other layers with a Double
Common Intermediate Format (DCIF) resolution.The Peak
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the video has been ana-
lyzed for the first 200 frames. The results were plotted in
Figure 5 where each numbered Layer PSNR line corresponds
to the number of layers combined in the video. The metrics
55
Layer 2
50 Layer 1
PSNR (dB)
Layer 9
45 Layer 3
40 Layer 4
Layer 8
35 Layer 5
Layer 6
30 Layer 7
0 50 100 150 200
Frame
Figure 5: PSNR of a test video
used in each test measured the Bandwidth, Network Load,
RTT, Cache size and PSNR. For each relevant test the layer
variation during streaming was also collected. For a score
reference on the perceived quality of the received media after
compression and/or transmission, during the analysis of the
results the following relationship between PSNR and Mean
Opinion Score (MOS) was used (Table 1). The bandwidth
Table 1: Possible PSNR to MOS conversion. [2]
PSNR MOS
> 37 5 (Excellent)
31-37 4 (Good)
25-31 3 (Fair)
20-25 2 (Poor)
< 20 1 (Bad)
variation, from 10 Mbit/s to 256 kbit/s, allowed testing the
adaptability of the solution to fluctuations in network ca-
pacity. The lower limit of 256 kbit/s corresponded to the
minimum throughput required to play-out a video without
pauses or re-buffering. The tests started with the maximum

Figure 6: Network load and number of layers
bandwidth until arriving to second t = 120 when the band-
width was suddenly dropped to the minimum (Figure 6).
The results show, for t < 120, that the system does not oc-
cupies a constant bandwidth during the video stream, but
has a spiky nature due to the small size of the video chunks
(of 2 s) that are downloaded faster that their play-out dura-
tion. The RTT value (Figure 7) was also fairly small during
that first period (around 10 ms) and the video could be
watched with maximum quality. At the instant t = 120, the
Figure 7: Round-Trip Time (RTT)
system detects the variation in networks conditions and au-
tomatically adapts the number of layers to be requested to
the available bandwidth. From that moment onwards, the
system uses the full available bandwidth continuously, and
still manages, at a few moments, to download up to layer
level 4, due to the variable size of the layer files (above the
base layer) of each chunk.
4. CONCLUSION
This paper describes the architecture of a SVC adaptive
streaming solution, using HTTP with P2P capabilities for
chunk-based media transport, suitable for heterogeneous net-
work environments.The solution incorporates quality control
mechanisms to allow video play-out without pauses, stut-
tering or image artifacts, by smoothly minimizing variations
from network and system conditions. This system is com-
patible with H.264/AVC and supports real-time streaming.
4.1 Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding
from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
([FP7/2007-2013] ) under grant agreement n◦ ICT-248474.
The authors would like to thank Jânio Monteiro for all his
support and expertise in the Scalable Video Coding area [6].
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