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Toward an Adaptive Screencast Platform: Measurement and Optimization

Published: 08 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The binding between computing devices and displays is becoming dynamic and adaptive, and screencast technologies enable such binding over wireless networks. In this article, we design and conduct the first detailed measurement study on the performance of the state-of-the-art screencast technologies. Several commercial and one open-source screencast technologies are considered in our detailed analysis, which leads to several insights: (1) there is no single winning screencast technology, indicating room to further enhance the screencast technologies; (2) hardware video encoders significantly reduce the CPU usage at the expense of slightly higher GPU usage and end-to-end delay, and should be adopted in future screencast technologies; (3) comprehensive error resilience tools are needed as wireless communication is vulnerable to packet loss; (4) emerging video codecs designed for screen contents lead to a better Quality of Experience (QoE) of screencast; and (5) rate adaptation mechanisms are critical to avoiding degraded QoE due to network dynamics. As a case study, we propose a nonintrusive yet accurate available bandwidth estimation mechanism. Real experiments demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of our proposed solution. Our measurement methodology, open-source screencast platform, and case study allow researchers and developers to quantitatively evaluate other design considerations, which will lead to optimized screencast technologies.

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Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, Toward an Adaptive Screencast Platform: Measurement and Optimization

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
    ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 12, Issue 5s
    Special Section on Multimedia Big Data: Networking and Special Section on Best Papers From ACM MMSYS/NOSSDAV 2015
    December 2016
    288 pages
    ISSN:1551-6857
    EISSN:1551-6865
    DOI:10.1145/3001754
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 08 November 2016
    Accepted: 01 December 2015
    Revised: 01 December 2015
    Received: 01 August 2015
    Published in TOMM Volume 12, Issue 5s

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    Author Tags

    1. Live video streaming
    2. performance evaluation
    3. performance optimization
    4. real-time encoding

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