Adapting video streams to network conditions in a gaming-on-demand service: Master's thesis

Rapid development of broadband access technologies has made it possible to introduce completely new types of Internet services to the market. One of these services is Gaming-on-Demand where a user has an access to wide variety of games through his/her broadband connection. The game software is run on a remote server while the audiovisual output of the game is streamed to the client. User commands are correspondingly transmitted through the network back to the Gaming-on-Demand server. One of the biggest problems in usingGaming-on-Demand services over a broadband connection is that the service cannot easily handle large variations in the available bandwidth. In a scenario, where there are other network devices connected to the same local area network as the Gaming-on-Demand client, the gaming service can easily be disturbed by the traffic generated by the other devices. To enable the system to manage in time-varying network conditions, application level Quality of Service mechanisms may be applied. The contribution of this thesis is an architecture for adapting the Gaming-on-Demand service to prevailing network condi-tions. The architecture consists of two parts: a network monitor which constantly monitors the performance of the network and an adaptation module which uses this information to adapt the service. The advantages of using the designed architecture are also proved with measurements employing emulated real world network scenarios. Test results show that using adaptation for video streaming in Gaming-on-Demand service improves the performance of the service significantly. Because the Gaming-on-Demand service is basically a kind of video service, the results can also be applied to other kinds of real-time multimedia services.