155 research outputs found
Quality of experience-centric management of adaptive video streaming services : status and challenges
Video streaming applications currently dominate Internet traffic. Particularly, HTTP Adaptive Streaming ( HAS) has emerged as the dominant standard for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet, thanks to its capability of matching the video quality to the available network resources. In HAS, the video client is equipped with a heuristic that dynamically decides the most suitable quality to stream the content, based on information such as the perceived network bandwidth or the video player buffer status. The goal of this heuristic is to optimize the quality as perceived by the user, the so-called Quality of Experience (QoE). Despite the many advantages brought by the adaptive streaming principle, optimizing users' QoE is far from trivial. Current heuristics are still suboptimal when sudden bandwidth drops occur, especially in wireless environments, thus leading to freezes in the video playout, the main factor influencing users' QoE. This issue is aggravated in case of live events, where the player buffer has to be kept as small as possible in order to reduce the playout delay between the user and the live signal. In light of the above, in recent years, several works have been proposed with the aim of extending the classical purely client-based structure of adaptive video streaming, in order to fully optimize users' QoE. In this article, a survey is presented of research works on this topic together with a classification based on where the optimization takes place. This classification goes beyond client-based heuristics to investigate the usage of server-and network-assisted architectures and of new application and transport layer protocols. In addition, we outline the major challenges currently arising in the field of multimedia delivery, which are going to be of extreme relevance in future years
Cooperative Multi-Bitrate Video Caching and Transcoding in Multicarrier NOMA-Assisted Heterogeneous Virtualized MEC Networks
Cooperative video caching and transcoding in mobile edge computing (MEC)
networks is a new paradigm for future wireless networks, e.g., 5G and 5G
beyond, to reduce scarce and expensive backhaul resource usage by prefetching
video files within radio access networks (RANs). Integration of this technique
with other advent technologies, such as wireless network virtualization and
multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA), provides more flexible
video delivery opportunities, which leads to enhancements both for the
network's revenue and for the end-users' service experience. In this regard, we
propose a two-phase RAF for a parallel cooperative joint multi-bitrate video
caching and transcoding in heterogeneous virtualized MEC networks. In the cache
placement phase, we propose novel proactive delivery-aware cache placement
strategies (DACPSs) by jointly allocating physical and radio resources based on
network stochastic information to exploit flexible delivery opportunities.
Then, for the delivery phase, we propose a delivery policy based on the user
requests and network channel conditions. The optimization problems
corresponding to both phases aim to maximize the total revenue of network
slices, i.e., virtual networks. Both problems are non-convex and suffer from
high-computational complexities. For each phase, we show how the problem can be
solved efficiently. We also propose a low-complexity RAF in which the
complexity of the delivery algorithm is significantly reduced. A Delivery-aware
cache refreshment strategy (DACRS) in the delivery phase is also proposed to
tackle the dynamically changes of network stochastic information. Extensive
numerical assessments demonstrate a performance improvement of up to 30% for
our proposed DACPSs and DACRS over traditional approaches.Comment: 53 pages, 24 figure
Provider-Controlled Bandwidth Management for HTTP-based Video Delivery
Over the past few years, a revolution in video delivery technology has taken place as mobile viewers and over-the-top (OTT) distribution paradigms have significantly changed the landscape of video delivery services. For decades, high quality video was only available in the home via linear television or physical media. Though Web-based services brought video to desktop and laptop computers, the dominance of proprietary delivery protocols and codecs inhibited research efforts. The recent emergence of HTTP adaptive streaming protocols has prompted a re-evaluation of legacy video delivery paradigms and introduced new questions as to the scalability and manageability of OTT video delivery.
This dissertation addresses the question of how to enable for content and network service providers the ability to monitor and manage large numbers of HTTP adaptive streaming clients in an OTT environment. Our early work focused on demonstrating the viability of server-side pacing schemes to produce an HTTP-based streaming server. We also investigated the ability of client-side pacing schemes to work with both commodity HTTP servers and our HTTP streaming server. Continuing our client-side pacing research, we developed our own client-side data proxy architecture which was implemented on a variety of mobile devices and operating systems. We used the portable client architecture as a platform for investigating different rate adaptation schemes and algorithms. We then concentrated on evaluating the network impact of multiple adaptive bitrate clients competing for limited network resources, and developing schemes for enforcing fair access to network resources.
The main contribution of this dissertation is the definition of segment-level client and network techniques for enforcing class of service (CoS) differentiation between OTT HTTP adaptive streaming clients. We developed a segment-level network proxy architecture which works transparently with adaptive bitrate clients through the use of segment replacement. We also defined a segment-level rate adaptation algorithm which uses download aborts to enforce CoS differentiation across distributed independent clients. The segment-level abstraction more accurately models application-network interactions and highlights the difference between segment-level and packet-level time scales. Our segment-level CoS enforcement techniques provide a foundation for creating scalable managed OTT video delivery services
Context-Aware Adaptive Prefetching for DASH Streaming over 5G Networks
The increasing consumption of video streams and the demand for higher-quality
content drive the evolution of telecommunication networks and the development
of new network accelerators to boost media delivery while optimizing network
usage. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) enables the possibility to enforce
media delivery by deploying caching instances at the network edge, close to the
Radio Access Network (RAN). Thus, the content can be prefetched and served from
the MEC host, reducing network traffic and increasing the Quality of Service
(QoS) and the Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper proposes a novel
mechanism to prefetch Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) streams at
the MEC, employing a Machine Learning (ML) classification model to select the
media segments to prefetch. The model is trained with media session metrics to
improve the forecasts with application layer information. The proposal is
tested with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs)' 5G MEC and RAN and compared with
other strategies by assessing cache and player's performance metrics
A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing for Video Streaming : Opportunities and Challenges
5G communication brings substantial improvements in the quality of service provided to various applications by achieving higher throughput and lower latency. However, interactive multimedia applications (e.g., ultra high definition video conferencing, 3D and multiview video streaming, crowd-sourced video streaming, cloud gaming, virtual and augmented reality) are becoming more ambitious with high volume and low latency video streams putting strict demands on the already congested networks. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that extends cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network i.e., at the base station level. To meet the latency requirements and avoid the end-to-end communication with remote cloud data centers, MEC allows to store and process video content (e.g., caching, transcoding, pre-processing) at the base stations. Both video on demand and live video streaming can utilize MEC to improve existing services and develop novel use cases, such as video analytics, and targeted advertisements. MEC is expected to reshape the future of video streaming by providing ultra-reliable and low latency streaming (e.g., in augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles), pervasive computing (e.g., in real-time video analytics), and blockchain-enabled architecture for secure live streaming. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent developments in MEC-enabled video streaming bringing unprecedented improvement to enable novel use cases. A detailed review of the state-of-the-art is presented covering novel caching schemes, optimal computation offloading, cooperative caching and offloading and the use of artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning) in MEC-assisted video streaming services.publishedVersionPeer reviewe
EdgeDASH: Exploiting Network-Assisted Adaptive Video Streaming for Edge Caching
While edge video caching has great potential to decrease the core network
traffic as well as the users' experienced latency, it is often challenging to
exploit the caches in current client-driven video streaming solutions due to
two key reasons. First, even those clients interested in the same content might
request different quality levels as a video content is encoded into multiple
qualities to match a wide range of network conditions and device capabilities.
Second, the clients, who select the quality of the next chunk to request, are
unaware of the cached content at the network edge. Hence, it becomes imperative
to develop network-side solutions to exploit caching. This can also mitigate
some performance issues, in particular for the scenarios in which multiple
video clients compete for some bottleneck capacity. In this paper, we propose a
network-side control logic running at a WiFi AP to facilitate the use of cached
video content. In particular, an AP can assign a client station a different
video quality than its request, in case the alternative quality provides a
better utility. We formulate the quality assignment problem as an optimization
problem and develop several heuristics with polynomial complexity. Compared to
the baseline where the clients determine the quality adaptation, our proposals,
referred to as EdgeDASH, offer higher video quality, higher cache hits, and
lower stalling ratio which are essential for user's satisfaction. Our
simulations show that EdgeDASH facilitates significant cache hits and decreases
the buffer stalls only by changing the client's request by one quality level.
Moreover, from our analysis, we conclude that the network assistance provides
significant performance improvement, especially when the clients with identical
interests compete for a bottleneck link's capacity
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