iStream: A Flexible Container-Based Testbed for Multimedia Streaming

Multimedia streaming is growing at a phenomenal rate, especially with the emergence of augmented/virtual reality applications and the growing demand for YouTube-like services. This stimulates research in all aspects of streaming systems, including but not limited to real-time and resource-efficient transcoding, server efficiency, network optimization, and client adaptation. Research and development of any part of the system require repetitive and tedious tasks in setting up the rest of the system for validation and evaluation of new ideas. This not only complicates the research work but also challenges the reproducibility and sharing of the research results. Existing proposed testbeds all have a specific focus and do not address all components of multimedia streaming. In this paper, we propose iStream, a flexible testbed for multimedia streaming system that integrates various components relevant to such systems. The components are plug-&-playable and customizable to compose various streaming systems and setups. iStream provides multimedia system researchers and developers with a flexible playground to explore their innovative ideas. Along with the design, we present a diverse set of case studies demonstrating the wide-range use of iStream.