PyStream improves video streaming tests with accurate local network emulation
PyStream: Enhancing Video Streaming Evaluation
Networking and Internet ArchitectureMultimedia
Summary
Testing how video streaming works when internet connections change can be hard and expensive. The authors created PyStream, which uses Docker containers to simulate many users watching videos on one computer. PyStream makes these tests more accurate and cheaper by copying real network conditions better than older tools. This helps people who build video streaming services understand and improve how their videos play across different internet speeds.
What this means in practice
- •For video platform engineers: Run many local video streaming tests that better mimic real network changes to improve player performance evaluation.
- •For cloud infrastructure teams: Reduce cloud resource use and costs by shifting some network emulation tasks to a local, container-based system.
Authors
Samuel Radler, Leon Prüller, Emanuele Artioli, Farzad Tashtarian, Christian Timmerer
Abstract
As streaming services become more commonplace, analyzing their behavior effectively under different network conditions is crucial. This is normally quite expensive, requiring multiple players with different bandwidth configurations to be emulated by a powerful local machine or a cloud environment. Furthermore, emulating a realistic network behavior or guaranteeing adherence to a real network trace is challenging. This paper presents PyStream, a simple yet powerful way to emulate a video streaming network, allowing multiple simultaneous tests to run locally. By leveraging a network of Docker containers, many of the implementation challenges are abstracted away, keeping the resulting system easily manageable and upgradeable. We demonstrate how PyStream not only reduces the requirements for testing a video streaming system but also improves the accuracy of the emulations with respect to the current state-of-the-art. On average, PyStream reduces the error between the original network trace and the bandwidth emulated by video players by a factor of 2-3 compared to Wondershaper, a common network traffic shaper in many video streaming evaluation environments. Moreover, PyStream decreases the cost of running experiments compared to existing cloud-based video streaming evaluation environments such as CAdViSE.