When Video Streaming Meets Named Data Networking: A Case Study

By using a data-driven communication pattern other than location-driven pattern, Named Data Networking (NDN) offers better support for content distribution applications such as video playback application. We propose NDNlive, which exploits the features of NDN to stream live and prerecorded video captured by the camera to multiple players. Instead of fixed-size segmentation, NDNlive chops video stream into frames which are the Application Data Units (ADU)-units of information represented in a most suitable form. NDNlive adopts different data retrieval strategies for the audio, video content and the media metadata according to their data properties and different data generation patterns. NDNlive can tolerate small network problems thanks to the flexibility provided by the frame fetch pipelining strategy. We have deployed NDNlive over the world-wide NDN Testbed. Our experiments show that NDNlive can provide fluent and synchronized video streaming across 11 time zones in the worldwide. This case study gives plenty of details in design, implementation and measurement, which can be regarded as a tutorial to study NDN applications.