Strategies for Efficient Streaming in Delay-Tolerant Multimedia Applications

We consider multimedia applications where clients specify a minimum desired stream rate (quality) and a time till when they are willing to wait, termed delay tolerance. The content service provider´s (CSP) objective is to service as many clients´ requests for the same multimedia content with a single stream while satisfying their requirements. We propose an optimization approach to determine the rates delivered at clients and study three transcoder deployment strategies: (i) Source transcoding (ST): when content encoded at different rates are available only at the source (ii) Anywhere transcoding (AT): when transcoding capability is available at all intermediate nodes, and (iii) Selected node transcoding (SNT): when transcoding capability is available at selected intermediate nodes. Considering the complexity of the optimal solution, we propose a set of heuristic based algorithms for delivering enhanced rates to clients using the three strategies. A practical content dissemination network is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategies