Method

The measurement procedure used scripts for starting and stopping the different tools. They can be found in the research/scripts/ directory.

nmon for Linux

The measures taken server-side are obtained using the nmon utility (official website). You can install it easily via your host's package manager.

You can see in the monitor.sh script we set the monitoring frequency to 1 every second with the -s flag and the number of counters to 6000 with -c. You will probably need to stop the monitoring manually or change these values.

The output CSV is not easy to manipulate, we recommend using NMON Visualizer for previewing and exporting the relevant data.

Scripts

Dependencies

They need some tools to be installed on your personal machine (running GNU/Linux) and on the running master node (host).

• Host
  • nmon (see above)
• PC
  • curl for making HTTP requests to the host
  • jq for translating the response into readable JSON
  • vlc as a DASH/HLS client

You will need to define two variables in your terminal before executing the scripts.

export HST=<host IP or DN>
export USR=<user for connecting to host via ssh>

playlist.sh and clear.sh

no parameter

Use these scripts to respectively print the playlist and the transcoding status of the streams available, and clearing the chunks of all transcoded streams in the playlist.

monitor.sh

1 parameter of the following values: start/stop/download

./monitor.sh start

Use it to control nmon remotely or download the resulting CSV file.

client.sh

2 parameters: the first is the number of clients to start, the second is the url of the stream (starting with dash/ or hls/)

./client.sh 5 dash/bbb_sunflower_1080p_30fps_normal.mp4/index.mpd

Use it to launch a desired amount of VLC instances playing the role of the clients watching the given stream.

time.sh

1 parameter corresponding to the name of the measurement your taking

./time.sh scenario1_1

Use it to timestamp actions such as launching the video clients or taking another sip of coffee. Each time you use the command with the same parameter, a date timestamp is added in a file called .times. The point is for it to be quick to use to be as accurate as manually timestamping can be.