Emulation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP with Mininet

Video streaming is becoming more and more popular technology for media content delivery over the Internet Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) allows delivering data streams to a user with the highest possible bit rate in varying bandwidth conditions which is particularly significant for hopping communication channels present in wireless networks. This paper investigates the delivery of media content over the Internet using MPEG-DASH technology within the network emulation environment Mininet connected to a real hardware client and a server from a real IP-network. We present Mininet settings that allow embedding this virtual environment into existing network infrastructure. The study shows that the bandwidth variation of a communication channel emulated in Mininet yields similar effects on streaming video as compared to experimental results obtained with a specialized hardware-software network emulator configured with the same channel characteristics. We conclude that Mininet can be considered as a practical tool for the emulation of video streams transmission employing Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, as well as be used for the development of new adaptive control algorithms.