A Prototype of Mininet-Based System EmStream for Emulation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP

Abstract

With the proliferation of media systems for content delivery, there is a growing demand for sophisticated methods to research emerging technologies In this Held. For Instance, new solutions for streaming video can be studied using real communication networks which is not always convenient or even feasible. In this paper, we present EmStream a practical solution to investigate the delivery of media content over the Internet using a MPEG-DASH technology. In its core, EmStream combines network emulation environment Mininet with a real hardware client and a server from the IP-network. We describe the adopted approach and demonstrate a prototype of our Mininet-based system for the emulation of MPEG-DASH stream transmission over a pre-set network topology. Specifically, we will show how to embed the virtual Mininet environment into a real network infrastructure and utilize the aforementioned setting to conduct experiments. Based on our findings, we conclude that EmStream built upon Mininet is a practical tool for testing DASH-based me­ dia streaming. Moreover, our Mininet-based system is considered to be reasonably accurate for emulating DASH-content delivery in pre-set topologies as well as software-defined networks.

Keywords

• MPEG-DASH
• Mininet
• Emulation
• Emstream