| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 資訊工程學系碩博士班 === 94 === This paper implements a multimedia streaming and searching system in home networks. The system includes both embedded media player and media server. To minimize the installation process and obtain the most user preferable content among home network devices, UPnP and MPEG-7 are applied. Based on this system, this paper also presents a cousin-fair bandwidth allocation strategy for home networks that focus on the application of multimedia streaming, especially for movies. Bandwidth allocation for search entities (i.e., movies) is base on a bandwidth allocation weight (Ф), and then the contained server can choose a corresponding quality of movies (i.e., high, medium and low) for streaming service. The bandwidth allocation weight (Ф) is determined by both user preference and server hardware capability.
As the bandwidth allocation of a search entity is either over the server loading or exceeding the bandwidth needed for high quality movie, it is called bandwidth over-allocation. To share the over-allocated bandwidth among search entities, two sharing strategies are presented. One is called sibling-fair, i.e., as the bandwidth sharing can only be performed among the search entities from the same requestor (i.e., media player). The other one is called cousin-fair which is a bandwidth sharing strategy that shares the redundant bandwidth of some search entity to other search entities from all the requestors. Although the bandwidth allocation with cousin-fair can achieve both complete fairness among search entities and high bandwidth utilization, the throughput is unable to maximize. Therefore, bandwidth allocation of a search entity is needed to escape from over-allocating. Two improved methods, e.g., (soft/hard) gated-service and re-provision, have been employed to take advantage of the over-allocation bandwidth. Gated-service defines an upper bound of the bandwidth allocation and can be categorized into soft gated-service and hard gated-service according to the fairness degree of bandwidth allocation. As the bandwidth allocation of a search entity is lower than the bandwidth needed for low quality movie, it is called bandwidth under-allocation. Re-provision is a method that re-allocates the gathered bandwidth of under-allocated search entities by erasing the SE with lowest Φ until the gathered bandwidth is insufficient for the low quality movie. By using the proposed bandwidth-based multi-quality streaming mechanism, both high bandwidth utilization and throughput maximization are achieved in the UPnP-based home networks.
|
|---|
