MicroCast: cooperative video streaming on smartphones
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
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In this work, we are interested in a scenario where a group of smartphone users, within proximity of each other, are interested in watching the same video at the same time. The default operation today is that each user with a cellular connection downloads the video independently from the server. However, each phone's individual cellular connection may not be sufficient for providing high video quality. We propose a novel cooperative scheme, called MicroCast, for video streaming to a group of smartphones within proximity of each other. Each phone utilizes simultaneously two network interfaces: one (cellular) to connect to the video server and download parts of the video and the other (WiFi) to connect to the rest of the group and exchange downloaded parts. Fig. 1 illustrates MicroCast scenario. First, we propose a scheduling algorithm, MicroDownload, that decides which parts of the video each phone should download from the server, based on the phones' download rate. Second, we propose a novel all-to-all local dissemination scheme, MicroNC-P2, for sharing content among group members, which outperforms state-of-the-art peer-to-peer schemes in our setting. MicroNC-P2 is explicitly designed to exploit WiFi overhearing and network coding, based on a local broadcast framework, MicroBroadcast, which we developed specifically for Android phones. The full architecture of MicroCast is depicted in Fig. 2. To the best of our knowledge, MicroBroadcast is the first framework that allows smartphones to broadcast in high speed locally. We perform performance evaluation on a testbed consisting of several Android phones, and we show that each component separately as well as the combined system as a whole significantly improve the performance compared to alternative approaches. Furthermore, this improvement comes at no significant battery cost. The detailed description of MicroCast can be found in [1]. A video demo and a poster of MicroCast can be found at [2] and [3]. More supporting materials are provided in [4].