An experimental study of video uploading from mobile devices with HTTP streaming

Abstract

Mobile video traffic is growing rapidly in networks due to the continuing user adoption of smartphones and tablet computers. While video viewing is now prevalent on such devices, they also easily enable the recording and uploading of videos for quick publishing on popular video sharing websites. However, due to the nature of the shared wireless network, such as repeatedly dropped connections, significantly fluctuating transmission speeds, and restricted bandwidth usage, uploading videos directly from mobile devices, which frequently results in unacceptable end-to-end user experiences, has not been widely used yet. In this thesis, we examine the common challenges during the client-to-server uploading of mobile videos and propose a new approach that provides compatibility with the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard and at the same time improves content availability by reducing the end-to-end delay from the recording time of mobile videos to the publishing of the multi-bitrate encoded versions through a careful pipelining of the overall process. Our approach features (1) the use of segmentation of videos on the mobile devices before uploading and (2) segment-wise transcoding and transformatting on the server-side. To test the performance of our approach, we built a test-bed environment which consists of three components: a mobile uploader, a video hosting server and a mobile player, and implemented the proposed approach on two dominate mobile platforms (Android and iOS) for both stored and live videos. The experiment was performed on real mobile devices: three Android mobile devices and an iPhone 4. The experimental results show that our approach reduces the end-to-end startup latency significantly and provides users a better video streaming experience without any additional hardware requirements.