SHStream: Self-Healing Framework for HTTP Video-Streaming

HTTP video-streaming is leading delivery of video content over the Internet. This phenomenon is explained by the ubiquity of web browsers, the permeability of HTTP traffic and the recent video technologies around HTML5. However, the inclusion of multimedia requests imposes new requirements on web servers due to responses with life spans that can reach dozens of minutes and timing requirements for data fragments transmitted during the response period. Consequently, web-servers require real-time performance control to avoid playback outages caused by overloading and performance anomalies. We present SHStream, a self-healing framework for web servers delivering video-streaming content that provides (1) load admittance to avoid server overloading, (2) prediction of performance anomalies using online data stream learning algorithms, (3) continuous evaluation and selection of the best algorithm for prediction, and (4) proactive recovery by migrating the server to other hosts using container-based virtualization techniques. Evaluation of our framework using several variants of Hoeffding trees and ensemble algorithms showed that with a small number of learning instances, it is possible to achieve approximately 98% of recall and 99% of precision for failure predictions. Additionally, proactive fail over can be performed in less than 1 second.