High quality multimedia streaming over the Internet has proliferated in modern society due to the ever-increasing ties amongst people and businesses, thereby occupying the majority of all exchanged data traffic. The Internet is the primary multimedia exchange medium that is being used beyond its intended design. Using Hypertext Transfer Protocol/Transmission Control Protocol (HTTP/TCP), multimedia can be delivered to virtually all devices connected to the Internet. HTTP-based streaming suffers from the increasing overhead generated as the stream length, quality, and non-deterministic path conditions vary. In this paper, a novel cross-layer signalling reduction scheme is proposed to alleviate resource consumption in networks exchanging multimedia. The proposed scheme is a steganographic-based protocol translator that encodes information within multimedia payloads prior to packet flight to reduce the size of exchanged data. The encoded data is used by node pairs to replace bulky protocols, such as TCP, with lightweight protocols, such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP). In addition to the protocol translator, a routing scheme is given to be used in place of the inflated networking protocols to further reduce the header footprint. A utility function is developed to find the optimal overhead savings where simulations are conducted to verify the designs. Using virtual machines, the proposed translator is implemented where a multimedia file is exchanged and subject to encoding. The simulations and implementation show that the proposed methodologies will decrease the amount of signalling needed while increasing the overall network capacity. Furthermore, the proposed methods are capable of successfully extending existing signalling reduction methods.

Multimedia streams consume a significant chunk of the consumer Internet traffic exchanged and will continue to do so due to the ever-increasing connection among people, businesses, and industries. To cope with the deviation of the Internet's intended use, unreliable underlying infrastructure, and best effort protocols while leveraging existing technologies, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Adaptive Streaming is utilized by numerous multimedia services. Performance of HAS-based streaming services is limited by the growing control overhead generated by the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack as the stream length, multimedia fidelity, and network conditions vary. In this paper, a novel cross-layer steganographic-enabled signaling scheme is proposed to reduce service provider costs while improving multimedia session performance and maintaining expected Quality-of-Service (QoS). The proposed scheme is designed to encode control stream messages from any TCP/IP layer within payload messages to reduce the total amount of overhead exchanged, thereby decreasing resource utilization within source and intermediate nodes. Furthermore, the encoding scheme probes network conditions and session statistics for adaptive decision-making to enable real-time pliability of the proposed process. A utility function is developed to find the optimal cost savings where simulations are conducted to verify the designs. The proposed solution is then implemented using VideoLan Media Player transceivers residing in linux containers virtual machines, where a multimedia file is exchanged in the popular Advanced Video Coding (H.264) format. The results show a decrease in bandwidth and average queue waiting time costs of 4.71% and 29.61%, respectively, with a throughput increase of 5.77%.

Thin-client computing is being adopted by many industries to bring services to users through a unique platform over wide area networks (WAN). To improve thin-client communication sessions, some authors have proposed using the thin-client protocol with enhanced image compression techniques while others have proposed using drawing commands instead. To take full advantage of the capabilities of thin-client systems, an advance communication protocol is needed. In this paper, a lightweight multicasting protocol for thin-client systems, Thin- Cast, is proposed where the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by a user are maintained while meeting the latency constraints. ThinCast establishes a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network using the underlying Internet protocol (IP) infrastructure. A central server explicitly requests a peer to forward a payload to a list of defined neighboring peers. While using ThinCast, server costs are reduced since the required throughput to achieve the same quality of service is lowered. On average, the throughput decreased by 11% under different simulation scenarios. The decrease in throughput values allows the server to temporarily increase the packet generation rate, thereby increasing the quality of the received video by the users.