DASH Streaming traffic influence over energy efficient ethernet to improve energy savings

Abstract

[EN] Dynamic Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is the main standard used in online video streaming services, given that more than 1.2 billion pay subscribers around the world use this standard. This fact entails billions of streaming connections between video servers and client displays. These devices involved in the streaming connection use an Ethernet Interface Card that consumes energy. In order to reduce the energy consumption, IEEE proposed the 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet standard, with a mechanism to make the network card change to a low power consumption mode when it is not in transmission mode. This behavior will be beneficial for services where traffic is sent in bursts, for instance video packet bursts like in video streaming over Real Time Transport Protocol in IPTV or the widely used DASH standard. Therefore, in this study the Ethernet traffic pattern when transmitting online video content using DASH is characterized in order to analyze the efficiency of the IEEE 802.3az standard under this video streaming scenario, and to verify the convenience of activating this energy saving alternative at the network interface of billions of client devices. The experiments have been conducted using a test-bed con- sisting of a full DASH streaming architecture, comparing different video segment sizes and changing the available bandwidth during the experiments in different scenarios in order to analyze the effect of the DASH content segment size on the Ethernet traffic pattern to identify the trade-off between energy efficiency, the energy savings, and the impact on the performance of the dynamic adaptation on the video streaming and reproduction.