ABSTRACT:

Video streaming traffic has been surging in the last few years, which has resulted in an increase of its Internet traffic share on a daily basis. The importance of video streaming management has been emphasized with the advent of High Definition (HD) video streaming, as it requires by its nature more network resources.

In this dissertation, we provide a better support for managing HD video traffic over both wireless and wired networks through several contributions. We present a simple, general and accurate video source model: Simplified Seasonal ARIMA Model (SAM). SAM is capable of capturing the statistical characteristics of video traces with less than 5% difference from their calculated optimal models. SAM is shown to be capable of modeling video traces encoded with MPEG-4 Part2, MPEG-4 Part10, and Scalable Video Codec (SVC) standards, using various encoding settings.

We also provide a large and publicly-available collection of HD video traces along with their analyses results. These analyses include a full statistical analysis of HD videos, in addition to modeling, factor and cluster analyses. These results show that by using SAM, we can achieve up to 50% improvement in video traffic prediction accuracy. In addition, we developed several video tools, including an HD video traffic generator based on our model.

Finally, to improve HD video streaming resource management, we present a SAM-based delay-guaranteed dynamic resource allocation (DRA) scheme that can provide up to 32.4% improvement in bandwidth utilization.

Complete thesis in Adobe Acrobat format.