Steganographic-Based Header Size Reduction Technique for Multimedia Streams

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.