Efficient and secure delivery of scalable video streams

In today's multimedia systems, clients are getting quite heterogeneous in terms of connection bandwidth, processing power, and display resolution. Scalable video coding techniques can support this heterogeneity by enabling us to encode a video stream once and extract/decode it in several ways according to receiver's capabilities. We study secure and efficient delivery of scalable streams. First, we propose an authentication scheme for end-to-end secure delivery of scalable video streams, which supports their full flexibility: it enables verification of any possible substream extracted from the original stream. Then, we consider streaming of scalable videos over peer-to-peer networks, and study efficient management of seed servers resources in these networks. We prove the hardness of optimally allocating these servers and propose two approximation algorithms to solve it. We evaluate both our security and resource allocation solutions and show their efficiency analytically and through simulations.