Compliance Procedures for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

Abstract: MPEG has been actively contributing towards the multimedia side in terms of storage and delivery of media content with flexible and advance file formats like the MPEG-2 transport stream and lately the MPEG 4 formats. Adaptive Streaming over HTTP is relatively a new genre in the area of streaming where this diverse content is delivered to TV’s, portable data units, smart phones, homes set top boxes etc. Most common of these streaming in practice are the apple live streaming, Smooth Streaming by Microsoft, HTTP Adaptive streaming as per the 3GPP specifications and the MPEG specified Dynamic Adaptive streaming over HTTP- (DASH). The technology is based on intelligence at clients end to cope up with variable network conditions and optimize the performance in an automated fashion. As the DASH specification is being finalized measures are to be taken to define criteria that will ensure the validation of a DASH process. Rules and conditions specified in the specification need to be followed by the client and server interaction as well as the content that will actually constitute the streaming process. This conformance is necessary to ensure the properties defined for a streaming process to provide the best user experience and performance efficiency. In light of this an initiative in this area of conformance testing is required so that the future  deployment and implementation of DASH has a baseline to follow. The initial outline lay out by MPEG and DASH is followed to formulate and later implement the rules for the interaction between the client and the server. Secondly the content used in streaming is also checked for properties and attributes mentioned in the MPD and the ones necessary for DASH process. These efforts will help define the criteria required for DASH validation as well as a ground work that can be extended for further work in this domain. In summary, the main tasks are - Development of last stage of the integrated software for MPD conformance stages (Java Script) - Formulation of Rules for Conformance from DASH specifications. - Extension to the existing Qualcomm DASH Reference software to support conformance test on media content level The thesis mainly concentrates on logs that are the result of conformance processing. The logs are analyzed to see the whether the condition specified are fulfilled or not. The process can be regarded as a ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ result indicating the fault/error that occurred.