Scalable On-Demand Streaming of Non-Linear Media

Yanping Zhao Ph.D. Student Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan

DEPARTMENT SEMINAR DATE: Monday, December 1, 2003 TIME: 3:30 p.m. PLACE: 2E25 Agriculture *** Everyone is welcome ***

Abstract

Multimedia streaming applications, such as video-on-demand, allow end-users to begin the playback of a video/audio file before its delivery from the server is complete. Such applications are continuously gaining popularity with the rapid deployment of broadband network connections. Scalable delivery techniques can efficiently aggregate end-users requesting the same file close in times into groups and multicast or broadcast one server stream to each group instead of each end-user. It has been found that these techniques can substantially reduce server and network bandwidth usage. This talk addresses scalable streaming of non-linear media files, such as multi-ending movies, for future customized and interactive multimedia applications, such as pick-your-own-ending movie-on-demand. Such media files consist of parallel sequences of data frames, among which clients can dynamically select at designated branching points. Since clients accessing the same non-linear media file may receive different data, according to their respective selections at branching points, existing scalable delivery techniques cannot be directly used to deliver non-linear media files. This talk discusses a number of new scalable delivery techniques for such media, and analyzes the server bandwidth requirements of these techniques. This talk also discusses the implementation of a non-linear media streaming prototype system as a proof-of-concept.

About the speaker

Yanping Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate of the Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan. Her general research area covers the design and performance evaluation of distributed systems and computer networks. Her particularly research interests are in multimedia streaming systems, overlay networks, IP multicast, peer-to-peer systems, and World Wide Web.

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