Predictive CDN Selection for Video Delivery Based on LSTM Network Performance Forecasts and Cost-Effective Trade-Offs

Owing to increasing consumption of video streams and demand for higher quality content and more advanced displays, future telecommunication networks are expected to outperform current networks in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs). Currently, content delivery networks (CDNs) are used to enhance media availability and delivery performance across the Internet in a cost-effective manner. The proliferation of CDN vendors and business models allows the content provider (CP) to use multiple CDN providers simultaneously. However, extreme concurrency dynamics can affect CDN capacity, causing performance degradation and outages, while overestimated demand affects costs. 5G standardization communities envision advanced network functions executing video analytics to enhance or boost media services. Network accelerators are required to enforce CDN resilience and efficient utilization of CDN assets. In this regard, this study investigates a cost-effective service to dynamically select the CDN for each session and video segment at the Media Server, without any modification to the video streaming pipeline being required. This service performs time series forecasts by employing a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to process real time measurements coming from connected video players. This service also ensures reliable and cost-effective content delivery through proactive selection of the CDN that fits with performance and business constraints. To this end, the proposed service predicts the number of players that can be served by each CDN at each time; then, it switches the required players between CDNs to keep the (Quality of Service) QoS rates or to reduce the CP's operational expenditure (OPEX). The proposed solution is evaluated by a real server, CDNs, and players and delivering dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), where clients are notified to switch to another CDN through a standard MPEG-DASH media presentation description (MPD) update mechanismThis work was supported in part by the EC projects Fed4Fire+, under Grant 732638 (H2020-ICT-13-2016, Research and Innovation Action), and in part by Open-VERSO project (Red Cervera Program, Spanish Government's Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology

Web Traffic Prediction Using Autoregressive, LSTM, and XGBoost Time Series Models

Web traffic is vital to the success of any online company or website in the current era of digital technology. Insightful marketing, web development, and resource allocation choices may be made with the support of reliable online traffic forecasts. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of the Autoregressive (AR), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) time series modeling strategies for forecasting website traffic. We evaluate the accuracy of these models in forecasting future online traffic by comparing their results on a real-world dataset. The performance of four different models for predicting a target variable was evaluated based on the provided information. The AR model had the highest test error, indicating poor performance, while the ARIMA model had a lower test error than the AR model, but its high SMAPE value on the training dataset suggested overfitting. The LSTM model had the lowest test error, but its high SMAPE value on the training dataset indicated that it may not have captured underlying patterns in the data well. The XGBoost model had a relatively low test error, suggesting good performance, and performed slightly better on the testing dataset than the ARIMA model. The study did not consider external factors that may impact website traffic, such as changes in search engine algorithms or other external shocks. These external factors can significantly impact website traffic, and not considering them may limit the generalizability of our study's findings

Analysing Cloud QoS Prediction Approaches and Its Control Parameters: Considering Overall Accuracy and Freshness of a Dataset

Service level agreement (SLA) management is one of the key issues in cloud computing. The primary goal of a service provider is to minimize the risk of service violations, as these results in penalties in terms of both money and a decrease in trustworthiness. To avoid SLA violations, the service provider needs to predict the likelihood of violation for each SLO and its measurable characteristics (QoS parameters) and take immediate action to avoid violations occurring. There are several approaches discussed in the literature to predict service violation; however, none of these explores how a change in control parameters and the freshness of data impact prediction accuracy and result in the effective management of an SLA of the cloud service provider. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we analyzed the accuracy of six widely used prediction algorithms - simple exponential smoothing, simple moving average, weighted moving average, Holt-Winter double exponential smoothing, extrapolation, and the autoregressive integrated moving average - by varying their individual control parameters. Each of the approaches is compared to 10 different datasets at different time intervals between 5 min and 4 weeks. Second, we analyzed the prediction accuracy of the simple exponential smoothing method by considering the freshness of a data; i.e., how the accuracy varies in the initial time period of prediction compared to later ones. To achieve this, we divided the cloud QoS dataset into sets of input values that range from 100 to 500 intervals in sets of 1-100, 1-200, 1-300, 1-400, and 1-500. From the analysis, we observed that different prediction methods behave differently based on the control parameter and the nature of the dataset. The analysis helps service providers choose a suitable prediction method with optimal control parameters so that they can obtain accurate prediction results to manage SLA intelligently and avoid violation penalties

A Survey of Anticipatory Mobile Networking: Context-Based Classification, Prediction Methodologies, and Optimization Techniques

A growing trend for information technology is to not just react to changes, but anticipate them as much as possible. This paradigm made modern solutions, such as recommendation systems, a ubiquitous presence in today's digital transactions. Anticipatory networking extends the idea to communication technologies by studying patterns and periodicity in human behavior and network dynamics to optimize network performance. This survey collects and analyzes recent papers leveraging context information to forecast the evolution of network conditions and, in turn, to improve network performance. In particular, we identify the main prediction and optimization tools adopted in this body of work and link them with objectives and constraints of the typical applications and scenarios. Finally, we consider open challenges and research directions to make anticipatory networking part of next generation networks

Towards personalised and adaptive QoS assessments via context awareness

Quality of Service (QoS ) properties play an important role in distinguishing between functionally-equivalent services and accommodating the different expectations of users. However, the subjective nature of some properties and the dynamic and unreliable nature of service environments may result in cases where the quality values advertised by the service provider are either missing or untrustworthy. To tackle this, a number of QoS estimation approaches have been proposed, utilising the observation history available on a service to predict its performance. Although the context underlying such previous observations (and corresponding to both user and service related factors) could provide an important source of information for the QoS estimation process, it has only been utilised to a limited extent by existing approaches. In response, we propose a context-aware quality learning model, realised via a learning-enabled service agent, exploiting the contextual characteristics of the domain in order to provide more personalised, accurate and relevant quality estimations for the situation at hand. The experiments conducted demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing promising results (in terms of prediction accuracy) in different types of changing service environments

Internet traffic volumes characterization and forecasting

Internet usage increases every year and the need to estimate the growth of the generated traffic has become a major topic. Forecasting actual figures in advance is essential for bandwidth allocation, networking design and investment planning. In this thesis novel mathematical equations are presented to model and to predict long-term Internet traffic in terms of total aggregating volume, globally and more locally. Historical traffic data from consecutive years have revealed hidden numerical patterns as the values progress year over year and this trend can be well represented with appropriate mathematical relations. The proposed formulae have excellent fitting properties over long-history measurements and can indicate forthcoming traffic for the next years with an exceptionally low prediction error. In cases where pending traffic data have already become available, the suggested equations provide more successful results than the respective projections that come from worldwide leading research. The studies also imply that future traffic strongly depends on the past activity and on the growth of Internet users, provided that a big and representative sample of pertinent data exists from large geographical areas. To the best of my knowledge this work is the first to introduce effective prediction methods that exclusively rely on the static attributes and the progression properties of historical values

Network-aware video streaming for future media Internet

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