Media Streams Planning with Uncertain Link Capacities

Abstract

Interactive collaborative environments built upon high quality video applications require minimum capture-to-display latency to maintain feeling of natural communication. In practice, end users often encounter interruptions due to network congestion, which they could not avoid without knowledge of physical network infrastructure. We solve the problem of application level multipoint routing without assuming accurate knowledge of network link capacities, but rather relying on their estimates by network inference and bandwidth measurement tools. Our approach can handle uncertainties caused by both unreliable bandwidth measurements and unexpected capacity sharing. Support for on-the-fly transcoding of data streams on multicast agents allows per-recipient adaptation of video quality and bandwidth. We have implemented an ant colony optimization algorithm in the Co Universe middleware for orchestration of collaborative environments. Experiments show very good quality of results on most practical use cases and ability to solve significantly larger instances than optimal approaches based on mixed integer programming.