goDASH — GO Accelerated HAS Framework for Rapid Prototyping

In this short paper, we present goDASH, an infrastructure for headless streaming of HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) video content, implemented in the language golang, an open-source programming language supported by Google. goDASH's main functionality is the ability to stream HAS content without decoding actual video (headless player). This results in low memory requirements and the ability to run multiple players in a large-scale-based evaluation setup. goDASH comes complete with numerous state-of-the-art HAS algorithms, and is fully written in the Google golang language, which simplifies the implementation of new adaptation algorithms and functions. goDASH supports two transportation protocols Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC). The QUIC protocol is a relatively new protocol with the promise of performance improvement over the widely used TCP. We believe that goDASH is the first emulation-based HAS player that supports QUIC. The main limitation in using QUIC protocol is the need for a security certificate setup on both ends (client and server) as QUIC demands an encrypted connection. This limitation is eased by providing our own testbed framework, known as goDASHbed. This framework uses a virtual environment to serve video content locally (which allows setting security certificates) through the Mininet virtual emulation tool. As part of Mininet, goDASH can be used in conjunction with other traffic generators.