NEWSMAN: Uploading videos over adaptive middleboxes to news servers in weak network infrastructures

Abstract

An interesting recent trend, enabled by the ubiquitous availability of mobile devices, is that regular citizens report events which news providers then disseminate, e.g., CNN iReport. Often such news are captured in places with very weak network infrastructures and it is imperative that a citizen journalist can quickly and reliably upload videos in the face of slow, unstable, and intermittent Internet access. We envision that some middleboxes are deployed to collect these videos over energy-efficient short-range wireless networks. Multiple videos may need to be prioritized, and then optimally transcoded and scheduled. In this study we introduce an adaptive middlebox design, called NEWSMAN, to support citizen journalists. NEWSMAN jointly considers two aspects under varying network conditions: (i) choosing the optimal transcoding parameters, and (ii) determining the uploading schedule for news videos. We design, implement, and evaluate an efficient scheduling algorithm to maximize a user-specified objective function. We conduct a series of experiments using trace-driven simulations, which confirm that our approach is practical and performs well. For instance, NEWSMAN outperforms the existing algorithms (i) by 12 times in terms of system utility (i.e., sum of utilities of all uploaded videos), and (ii) by 4 times in terms of the number of videos uploaded before their deadline.