Design of An Global Multicast Demonstrator for Live Video Streaming on Adobe's Flash Platform

100 Pages·2013·7.85 MB·English

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
Department of Informatics
Design of An
Global Multicast
Demonstrator for
Live Video
Streaming on
Adobe’s Flash
Platform
Master Thesis (60
credits)
Liping Huang
April 25, 2013
Design of An Global Multicast Demonstrator
for Live Video Streaming on Adobe’s Flash
Platform
Liping Huang
April 25, 2013
Abstract
Video streaming services has gained more and more popularity in today’s In-
ternet. With increasing number of users and video quality, the Internet traffic
for video streaming has increased dramatically. At present, most of video
streaming services utilize server-client model based on unicast. In a unicast
system, the servers suffer from overloading and lack scalability with increased
video traffic. Multicast has been considered as an efficient communication
mechanism and the basis of a decentralized model. It has been proposed and
implemented in video streaming service to overcome the drawbacks in unicast
system.
In this work, a multicast demonstrator on Adobe’s Flash platform is built
to investigate how multicast can improve network efficiency. A series of ex-
periments with the demonstrator are performed in real world Internet. The
Internet traffic are are measured and analyzed. The results show that multi-
cast can reduce the load on servers and traffic in network.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Trarik Cicic, Carsten Griwodz and Stein Gjessing who
have inspired, guided and given support during the course of work. I would
like to thank especially Tarik Cicic and his company - Media Network Services
AS, providing access to a server on the multicast-enabled network and helps
with the experiments.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my husband Gang Lin,
my two little princes Frank and Sam,
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Contents
Abstract iii
Acknowledgements v
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
List of Listings xii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Goal and Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Background 5
2.1 Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1.1 Internet Protocol (IP) Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.1.2 Application Layer Multicast (ALM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1.3 Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 Media Streaming Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2.1 Media Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2.2 Streaming Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.2.3 P2P Streaming Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3 Methodology 35
3.1 Adobe Flash Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.1.1 Flash Media Development Server 4.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.1.2 Flash Player . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.1.3 Flash Builder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
3.1.4 ActionScript 3.0 APIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.1.5 Server-Side ActionScript APIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.2 Environments for Demonstrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2.1 Configure Flash Media Server for RTMFP . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2.2 RTMFP Connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.2.3 Peer-assisted Networking Setting of Flash Player . . . . . . 48
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3.3 Demonstrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.3.1 RTMFP Group Specifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.3.2 Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.3.3 Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.3.4 Server-side application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4 Measurements and Results 59
4.1 Measurements of Demonstrator’s Components . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.1.1 Only Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.1.2 Only Receivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.2 Measurements of Streaming Demonstrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.2.1 Case One: One Receiver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.2.2 Case Two: Two Receivers Within Two Networks . . . . . . . 70
4.2.3 Case Three: Two Receivers Within Multicast-Enabled Net-
work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.3 Problems in Testing Demonstrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5 Conclusion 77
5.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.2 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.3 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Bibliography 81
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