Cloud-based Streaming Services Research Articles

Quantitative quality estimation of cloud-based streaming services

Cloud-based streaming services, such as real-time streaming video and gaming services, have emerged as popular online Internet applications in recent years. Providing systematic quality estimation before (or after) launching these services has raised a significant challenge due to dynamic runtime status of servers, clients and the network environment. This paper proposes a queueing model for the cloud-based streaming service in which packet level dynamics are taken into consideration so that customer-affected performance can be estimated by a hybrid simulation approach. The simulation approach is particularly useful for cloud service providers to evaluate the service quality before launching the service. The analytical model has two parts: (1) the virtual-machine-level service queueing model along with the stationary closed-form expressions on the average number of customers, the average waiting time, and the average number of employed virtual machines (VMs), and (2) the microscopic model and the simulation procedure on the customer side that capture the lag time of streaming packets. The simulation procedure is derived based on the analytical model. The simulation results show how the service quality is affected by server and customer performances, providing the insight for cloud resource provision and client parameter settings.

Material History: Record Collecting in the Digital Age

The rekindling popularity of the vinyl record and record collecting provide a counternarrative to the ideals of technological progress and supersession, signalling the paradoxical return of a physical music format in the digital realm where "the fetish of newness is at its most aggressive" (Tischleder and Wasserman 7). In this way, the vinyl record provides a disruptive lens through which to question media history as "a history of obsolescence, where new media displace and redefine older media" and explore how "obsolescence resists becoming obsolete" (Tischleder and Wasserman 2). Magaudda (29) argues that the dematerialisation of music media has reconfigured the role of materiality in media practices and has seen physical formats such as the vinyl record "bite back" as mediators of distinct listening practices and unique material relationships to music. Against the background of on-demand streaming services and retro nostalgia in the digital age (Hogarty), record collecting may be dismissed as a resistant and obsolete collecting practice. However, as this article will explore, record collecting can be characterised as a highly social practice, providing a means to communicate identity and taste, maintain a sense of the past, and orient the social life and personal history of the collector. This article reports on the results of ethnographic research investigating the record collections of some young millennial music fans to locate the position and significance of vinyl records in their social lives as a legacy media format. To do this, I examine three key capacities of vinyl record collections in evoking autobiographical memories, maintaining personal histories and anchoring a sense of the past. The significance of personal record collections and collecting practices was investigated in a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of self-identified record collectors. The sentiments of the collector in describing their collecting can be found to reveal their acquisitions as transactions within the spheres of commodity culture and the gift economy, articulating the renewed appeal of vinyl records in the digital age. This perspective of the social meanings and media practices surrounding vinyl records in the digital age highlight the formats significance in understanding the complex trajectories of media history.