Stephen McQuistin presented our poster on
Consolidating Streams to Improve DASH Cache Utilisation at the
ACM CoNEXT conference in Heidelberg, Germany, from 1-4 December 2015.
This is early work, starting to explore how to optimise caching for
large-scale video streaming systems based on the MPEG DASH standard
(and related systems).
We performed measurements to determine whether ECN is usable with
UDP-based transport protocols in the public Internet. These validate
the utility of
our previous work on ECN for RTP over UDP/IP, and feed
into
current IETF activities on congestion control for RTP-based interactive
multimedia running over UDP/IP, and on the
use of UDP as a
substrate for deployment of new transport protocols. Using
measurements from two residential sites in the UK, the University of
Glasgow, and servers in each of the nine EC2 regions worldwide, we test
reachability of 2500 servers from the public NTP server pool, using
ECT(0) and not-ECT marked UDP packets. We show that an average of
98.97% of the servers that are reachable using not-ECT marked packets
are also reachable using ECT(0) marked UDP packets, and that ~98% of
network hops pass ECT(0) marked packets without clearing the ECT bits.
We compare reachability of the same hosts using ECN with TCP, finding
that 82.0% of those reachable with TCP can successfully negotiate and
use ECN. Our findings suggest that ECN is broadly usable with UDP
traffic, and that support for use of ECN with TCP has increased.
The University of St Andrews awarded
Dr Vint Cerf an honorary doctorate on 24 June 2015. To celebrate this,
they organised a one-day event entitled
The Internet at 100, with a number of talks reviewing the history
of the Internet, its current state, and looking forward to the future.
I was honoured to be invited to speak at this event.
I attended the Adaptive Media Transport Workshop held at Cisco in
Issy Les Moulineaux, Paris, on 18-19 May 2015, and organised by
Ali Begen. The goal of the
workshop was to bring together those in industry and academia
working on adaptive video streaming over the Internet, with a
focus on technologies relating to MPEG DASH.
I have FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE running on a machine with 512GB memory.
Overall, FreeBSD runs very well on this hardware, but I was having
performance problems where some programs that I expected to run
essentially instantly were taking several seconds to complete.
Running screen -ls took around 5 seconds, for example,
but there were other programs with similar behaviour.
The preferred build tool and package manager for
the Rust programming language
is Cargo. Unfortunately, as early
January 2015 there is no release of Cargo for FreeBSD, and building
from source is difficult because the Cargo build process uses Cargo,
and needs an initial release to bootstrap. I found
a gist
that builds Cargo manually, but it only gives a single snapshot, and
the result is too old to use for bootstrapping the current version.