Cost-Efficient Cloud-Based Video Streaming Through Measuring Hotness. (25th June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Darwich, Mahmoud; Salehi, Mohsen Amini; Beyazit, Ege; Bayoumi, Magdy
• Is Part Of: Computer journal. Volume 62:Number 5(2019)
• Page Start: 641
• Page End: 656
• Publication Date: 2018-06-25
• Subjects: cloud services -- video on demand (VOD) -- partial pre-transcoding -- re-transcoding -- video streaming -- video stream hotness; Computers -- Periodicals; 005.1
• DOI: 10.1093/comjnl/bxy057
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0010-4620

Abstract

Abstract: Video streaming providers generally have to store several formats of the same video and stream the appropriate format based on the characteristics of the viewer's device. This approach, called pre-transcoding, incurs a significant cost to the stream providers that rely on cloud services. Furthermore, pre-transcoding proven to be inefficient due to the long-tail access pattern to video streams. To reduce the incurred cost, we propose to pre-transcode only frequently accessed videos (called hot videos) and partially pre-transcode others, depending on their hotness degree. Therefore, we need to measure video stream hotness. Accordingly, we first provide a model to measure the hotness of video streams. Then, we develop methods that operate based on the hotness measure and determine how to pre-transcode videos to minimize the cost of stream providers. The partial pre-transcoding methods operate at different granularity levels to capture different patterns in accessing videos. Particularly, one of the methods operates faster but cannot partially pre-transcode videos with the non-long-tail access pattern. Experimental results show the efficacy of our proposed methods, specifically, when a video stream repository includes a high percentage of the Frequently Accessed Video Streams and a high percentage of videos with the non-long-tail accesses pattern.