Rate-sensitive leverage of QoS and QoP for ubiquitous video streaming via buffer-aware feedback control

Abstract

Providing real-time Internet video streaming anytime, anywhere and using any devices from different access networks preserves more challenges to equilibrate the quality of service (QoS) and security protection (QoP). Because encryption/decryption for video packets are time-consuming processes to protect real-time video streaming services from eavesdropping, our observation is that the playback buffer occupancy (PBO) can simply indicate time availability to adjust security level to affect the packet sending rate. In this paper, we present an end-to-end buffer-aware feedback control from client PBO for effectively securing media streaming for heterogeneous clients over ubiquitous Internet. That is, security-level adjustments can be applied further to keep PBO running away from overflow and underflow to pursue an effective leverage between QoS and QoP. To further boost the protection, we also apply the Diffie-Hellman key negotiation method to provide the dynamic key changes. Moreover, since the running PBO will vary on the dynamics of Internet from access time, client devices and access networks, the different applied security levels and key changes during the video streaming session will make eavesdropper more difficult to recover all the encrypted videos delivered in public networks. We demonstrate the leverage performance in preserving both QoS and QoP for ubiquitous video streaming in our proposed schemes by comprehensive experiments on a true VoD system. The experimental results show our secure VoD scheme can achieve cost-effective leverage of QoS and QoP from different inserted network dynamics, even if client buffer size is limited to 256 KB only.