In practice, video delivery using multiple protocols is needed to support the wide range of clients in the digital media ecosystem. Naïve approaches increase backhaul traffic and cache storage requirements proportional to the number of protocols in use. To reduce this overhead, we present an efficient multi-protocol video delivery architecture. It exploits the fact that media segments in different protocols are often based on the same raw encoded media data. Instead of caching and distributing near duplicate media segments for each protocol throughout the content delivery network, we push their generation towards the edge. We call this Late Trans-Muxing (LTM). We implement LTM in a smart edge cache that can request and cache media byte ranges and generate protocol specific media segments on the fly. Experiments in an emulation testbed show that backhaul traffic and cache storage are reduced up to 85% and 50% respectively compared to CDN based approaches. This shows the benefit of LTM in multi-protocol DASH based video delivery.

Publication: MM ​’16: Proceedings of the 24^th ACM international conference on Multimedia