Video streaming represents a large fraction of Internet traffic. Surprisingly, little is known about the network characteristics of this traffic. In this paper, we study the network characteristics of the two most popular video streaming services, Netflix and YouTube. We show that the streaming strategies vary with the type of the application (Web browser or native mobile application), and the type of container (Silverlight, Flash, or HTML5) used for video streaming. In particular, we identify three different streaming strategies that produce traffic patterns from non-ack clocked ON-OFF cycles to bulk TCP transfer. We then present an analytical model to study the potential impact of these streaming strategies on the aggregate traffic and make recommendations accordingly.
The main objective of this article is to provide an overview of P2P based Video-on-Demand and live streaming services. The article starts with an introduction to media streaming and its simplified architecture. Various solutions offering video streaming in the context of widespread usage of Internet are discussed. This is followed by a short introduction to P2P networks and its applications. A broad discussion on various P2P streaming schemes and P2P streaming applications are the main focus of this chapter. Finally, the security issues and solutions for P2P video streaming are discussed brief…
We report results from a measurement study of three video streaming services, YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo on six different smartphones. We measure and analyze the traffic and energy consumption when streaming different quality videos over Wi-Fi and 3G. We identify five different techniques to deliver the video and show that the use of a particular technique depends on the device, player, quality, and service. The energy consumption varies dramatically between devices, services, and video qualities depending on the streaming technique used. As a consequence, we come up with suggestions on ho…
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…
Inferring the quality of network services is the vital basis of optimization for network operators. However, prevailing real-time video streaming applications adopt encryption for security, leaving it a problem to extract Quality of Service (QoS) indicators of real-time video. In this paper, we propose DaI, a traffic-based real-time video quality estimator. DaI can partially decrypt the encrypted real-time video data and applies machine learning methods to estimate key objective Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics of real-time video. According to the experimental results, DaI can estimate obje…
The fundamental conflict between the enormous space of adaptive streaming videos and the limited capacity for subjective experiment casts significant challenges to objective Quality-of-Experience (QoE) prediction. Existing objective QoE models exhibit complex functional form, failing to generalize well in diverse streaming environments. In this study, we propose an objective QoE model namely knowledge-driven streaming quality index (KSQI) to integrate prior knowledge on the human visual system and human annotated data in a principled way. By analyzing the subjective characteristics towards str…
Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) has become thede factotechnique for videostreaming over the Internet. Despite a flurry of techniques, achieving high quality ABRstreaming over cellular networks remains a tremendous challenge. First, the design ofan ABR scheme needs to balance conflicting Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics suchas video quality, quality changes, stalls and startup performance, which is even harderunder highly dynamic bandwidth in cellular network. Second, streaming providers havebeen moving towards using Variable Bitrate (VBR) encodings for the video content,which introduces ne…
In recent years, research efforts tried to exploit peer-to-peer (P2P) systems in order to provide Live Streaming (LS) and Video-on-Demand (VoD) services. Most of these research efforts focus on the development of distributed P2P block schedulers for content exchange among the participating peers and on the characteristics of the overlay graph (P2P overlay) that interconnects the set of these peers. Currently, researchers try to combine peer-to-peer systems with cloud infrastructures. They developed monitoring and control architectures that use resources from the cloud in order to enhance QoS a…
Applications that allow sharing of user-created short videos exploded in popularity in recent years. A typical short video application allows a user to swipe away the current video being watched and start watching the next video in a video queue. Such user interface causes significant bandwidth waste if users frequently swipe a video away before finishing watching. Solutions to reduce bandwidth waste without impairing the Quality of Experience (QoE) are needed. Solving the problem requires adaptively prefetching of short video chunks, which is challenging as the download strategy needs to matc…
We present and evaluate a procedure that utilizes mobility and throughput prediction to prefetch video streaming data in integrated cellular and WiFi networks. The effective integration of such heterogeneous wireless technologies will be significant for supporting high performance and energy efficient video streaming in ubiquitous networking environments. Our evaluation is based on trace-driven simulation considering empirical measurements and shows how various system parameters influence the performance, in terms of the number of paused video frames and the energy consumption; these parameter…
Most of today's mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces and one of the main bandwidth-hungry applications that would benefit from multipath communications is wireless video streaming. However, most of the current transport protocols do not match the requirements of video streaming applications or are not designed to address relevant issues, such as delay constraints, networks heterogeneity, and head-of-line blocking issues. This survey provides a holistic literature review of multipath wireless video streaming, shedding light on the different alternatives from an end-to-en…
Peer-to-Peer Live streaming and Video on Demand is the most popular media applications over the Internet in recent years. These systems reduce the load on the server and provide a scalable content distribution. A new paradigm of P2P network collaborates to build large distributed video applications on existing networks .But, the problem of designing the system are at par with the P2P media streaming, live and Video on demand systems. Hence a comprehensive design comparison is needed to build such kind of system architecture. Therefore, in this paper we elaborately studied the traditional appro…
In contrast to traditional videos, the imaging in virtual reality (VR) is 360°, and it consumes larger bandwidth to transmit video contents. To reduce bandwidth consumption, tile-based streaming has been proposed to deliver the focused part of the video, instead of the whole one. On the other hand, the techniques to alleviate cybersickness, which is akin to motion sickness and happens when using digital displays, have not been jointly explored with the tile selection in VR. In this paper, we investigate Tile Selection with Cybersickness Control (TSCC) in an adaptive 360° video streaming system…
This letter analyzes the Low-latency Region (LLR) of a best-effort link (i.e., no traffic differentiation, and first come first serve scheduling) carrying both delay-sensitive (DS) streaming and non-delay-sensitive (NDS) background traffic. Moreover, inside the LLR, we show it exists a proportional fair arrival rate allocation for both the DS and NDS traffic streams. This optimal operating point results from maximizing a simple throughput-delay trade-off that considers the NDS traffic load, and the mean delay of the DS packets. To show how the presented trade-off could be used to allocate NDS …
Zoomable video streaming refers to a new class of interactive video applications, where users can zoom into a video stream to view a selected region of interest in higher resolutions and pan around to move the region of interest. The zoom and pan effects are typically achieved by breaking the source video into a grid of independently decodable tiles. Streaming the tiles to a set of heterogeneous users using broadcast is challenging, as users have different link rates and different regions of interest at different resolution levels. In this paper, we consider the following problem: given the su…
We propose a robust scheme for streaming 360-degree immersive videos to maximize the quality of experience (QoE). Our streaming approach introduces a holistic analytical framework built upon the formal method of stochastic optimization. We propose a robust algorithm which provides a streaming rate such that the video quality degrades below that rate with very low probability even in presence of uncertain head movement, and bandwidth. It assumes the knowledge of the viewing probability of different portions (tiles) of a panoramic scene. Such probabilities can be easily derived from crowdsourced…
Video streaming is in high demand by mobile users, as recent studies indicate. In cellular networks, however, the unreliable wireless channel leads to two major problems. Poor channel states degrade video quality and interrupt the playback when a user cannot sufficiently fill its local playout buffer: buffer underruns occur. In contrast to that, good channel conditions cause common greedy buffering schemes to pile up very long buffers. Such over-buffering wastes expensive wireless channel capacity. To keep buffering in balance, we employ a novel approach. Assuming that we can predict data rate…
Nowadays Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is the most prevalent solution on the Internet for multimedia streaming and responsible for the majority of global traffic. DASH uses adaptive bit rate (ABR) algorithms, which select the video quality considering performance metrics such as throughput and playout buffer level. Pensieve is a system that allows to train ABR algorithms using reinforcement learning within a simulated network environment and is outperforming existing approaches in terms of achieved performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of the trained ABR…
Multiview video supports observing a scene from different viewpoints. The Joint Video Team (JVT) developed H.264/MVC to enhance the compression efficiency for multiview video, however, MVC encoded multiview video (MVC video) still requires high bitrates for transmission. This paper investigates live MVC video streaming over Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The goal is to minimize the server bandwidth costs whist ensuring high streaming quality to peers. MVC employs intra-view and inter-view prediction structures, which leads to a complicated layer dependency relationship. As the peers' outbound ba…
In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for video rate adaptation in HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), based on online learning. The proposed algorithm, named Learn2Adapt (L2A), is shown to provide a robust rate adaptation strategy which, unlike most of the state-of-the-art techniques, does not require parameter tuning, channel model assumptions or application-specific adjustments. These properties make it very suitable for mobile users, who typically experience fast variations in channel characteristics. Simulations show that L2A improves on the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) and in par…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of power control for streaming variable-bit-rate (VBR) videos in a device-to-device (D2D) wireless network. A VBR video traffic model that considers video frame sizes and playout buffers at the mobile users is adopted. A setup with one pair of D2D users (DUs) and one cellular user (CU) is considered and three modes, namely cellular mode, dedicated mode and reuse mode, are employed. Mode selection for the data delivery is determined and the transmit powers of the base station (BS) and device transmitter are optimized with the goal of maximizing the over…
The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets has made immersive and 360-degree video streaming the subject of intense interest in the industry and research communities. While the basic principles of video streaming are the same, immersive video presents a set of specific challenges that need to be addressed. In this survey, we present the latest developments in the relevant literature on four of the most important ones: (i) omnidirectional video coding and compression, (ii) subjective and objective Quality of Experience (QoE) and the factors that can affect it, (iii) saliency measure…
The combination of video streaming services and wireless networks plays an important role in many fields. In this paper, we present an NS-3-based simulation platform for evaluating and optimizing the performance of the video streaming application over wireless networks. The simulation is designed to provide real-time measurements, and thus it saves the high costs for real equipment. The developed platform consists of the video streaming server, video streaming client, and wireless network environment, where the video streaming operation is implemented under UDP protocol and is equipped with an…
This paper performs the feasibility study of stochastic video streaming algorithms with up-to-date 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) video traces. In previous work, various stochastic video streaming algorithms were proposed which maximize time-average video streaming quality subject to queue stability based on the information of queue-backlog length. The performance improvements with the stochastic video streaming algorithms were verified with traditional MPEG test sequences; but there is no study how much the proposed stochastic algorithm is better when we consider up-to-date 4K UHD video trace…
Network congestion and packet loss pose an ever-increasing challenge to video streaming. Despite the research efforts toward making video encoding schemes resilient to lossy network conditions, forwarding devices have not considered monitoring packet content to prioritize packets and minimize the impact of packet loss on video transmission. In this work, we advocate in favor of in-network computing employing a packet drop algorithm and an in-network hardware module to devise a solution for improving content-aware video streaming in congested network. Results show that our approach can reduce i…
We take an analytical approach to study the Quality of user Experience (QoE) for video streaming applications. Our propose is to characterize buffer starvations for streaming video with Long-Range-Dependent (LRD) input traffic. Specifically we develop a new analytical framework to investigate Quality of user Experience (QoE) for streaming by considering a Markov Modulated Fluid Model (MMFM) that accurately approximates the Long Range Dependence (LRD) nature of network traffic. We drive the close-form expressions for calculating the distribution of starvation as well as start-up delay using par…
We propose and analyze centralized and distributed algorithms for device-to-device video scheduling and streaming. The proposed algorithms address jointly the problems of device-to-device link scheduling and video quality adaptation in streaming. Our simulations show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform conventional separated approaches that treat these two problems independently.
Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming enables video users to adapt the playing bitrate to the real-time network conditions to achieve the desirable quality of experience (QoE). In this work, we propose a novel crowdsourced streaming framework for multi-user ABR video streaming over wireless networks. This framework enables the nearby mobile video users to crowdsource their radio links and resources for cooperative video streaming. We focus on analyzing the social welfare performance bound of the proposed crowdsourced streaming system. Directly solving this bound is challenging due to the asynchrono…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Ariel University（阿里尔大学）
The increasing popularity of HTTP adaptive video streaming services has dramatically increased bandwidth requirements on operator networks, which attempt to shape their traffic through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). However, Google and certain content providers have started to encrypt their video services. As a result, operators often encounter difficulties in shaping their encrypted video traffic via DPI. This highlights the need for new traffic classification methods for encrypted HTTP adaptive video streaming to enable smart traffic shaping. These new methods will have to effectively estimat…
Inferring the quality of streaming video applications is important for Internet service providers, but the fact that most video streams are encrypted makes it difficult to do so. We develop models that infer quality metrics (\ie, startup delay and resolution) for encrypted streaming video services. Our paper builds on previous work, but extends it in several ways. First, the model works in deployment settings where the video sessions and segments must be identified from a mix of traffic and the time precision of the collected traffic statistics is more coarse (\eg, due to aggregation). Second,…
While traditional multimedia applications such as games and videos are still popular, there has been a significant interest in the recent years towards new 3D media such as 3D immersion and Virtual Reality (VR) applications, especially 360 VR videos. 360 VR video is an immersive spherical video where the user can look around during playback. Unfortunately, 360 VR videos are extremely bandwidth intensive, and therefore are difficult to stream at acceptable quality levels. In this paper, we propose an adaptive bandwidth-efficient 360 VR video streaming system using a divide and conquer approach.…
Two main trends in today's internet are of major interest for video streaming services: most content delivery platforms coincide towards using adaptive video streaming over HTTP and new network architectures allowing caching at intermediate points within the network. We investigate one of the most popular streaming service in terms of rate adaptation and opportunistic caching. Our experimental study shows that the streaming client's rate selection trajectory, i.e., the set of selected segments of varied bit rates which constitute a complete video, is not repetitive across separate downloads. A…
Today a large portion of Internet traffic is video. Over The Top (OTT) service providers offer video streaming services by creating a large distributed cloud network on top of a physical infrastructure owned by multiple entities. Our study explores insights from video streaming activity by analyzing data collected from Korea's largest OTT service provider. Our analysis of nationwide data shows interesting characteristics of video streaming such as correlation between user profile information (e.g., age, sex) and viewing habits, viewing habits of users (when do the users watch? using which devi…
Morphe: High-Fidelity Generative Video Streaming with Vision Foundation Model
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（科学与工程学院，香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute（深圳未来网络智能研究院）；Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（王轩计算机技术研究所，北京大学）
Minimum Physical Hop (MPH) has been proposed as a peer selection algorithm for decreasing inter-AS (Autonomous System) traffic volume in P2P live streaming. In MPH, a newly joining peer selects a peer whose physical hop count (i.e., the number of ASes traversed on the content delivery path) from it is the minimum as its providing peer. However, MPH shows high inter-AS traffic volume when the number of joining peers is large. In this paper, we propose IMPH that tries to further decrease the inter-AS traffic volume by distributing peers with one logical hop count (i.e., the number of peers or or…
We present a brief summary of current approaches and challenges in the network traffic management area. In this contribution, we well cover the most recent experiments on the network traffic and behavior of applications under various network conditions. Quality of the users' experience is the most important factor being considered in this group of experiments.
In this paper, we study video streaming over wireless networks with network coding capabilities. We build upon recent work, which demonstrated that network coding can increase throughput over a broadcast medium, by mixing packets from different flows into a single packet, thus increasing the information content per transmission. Our key insight is that, when the transmitted flows are video streams, network codes should be selected so as to maximize not only the network throughput but also the video quality. We propose video-aware opportunistic network coding schemes that take into account both…
Recent work suggests that TCP throughput stability and predictability within a video viewing session can inform the design of better video bitrate adaptation algorithms. Despite a rich tradition of Internet measurement, however, our understanding of throughput stability and predictability is quite limited. To bridge this gap, we present a measurement study of throughput stability using a large-scale dataset from a video service provider. Drawing on this analysis, we propose a simple-but-effective prediction mechanism based on a hidden Markov model and demonstrate that it outperforms other appr…
Research in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) has produced many protocol designs and software prototypes, but they need to be validated and evaluated by real usage on the Internet, which is also critical to the realization of the ICN/NDN vision in the long-run. This paper presents the first Internet-scale adaptive video streaming service over NDN, which allows regular users to watch videos using NDN technology with no software installation or manual configuration. Since mid-2019, the official NDN website has started using our service to deliver its videos to …
We identify new opportunities in video streaming, involving the joint consideration of offline video chunking and online rate adaptation. Due to a video's complexity varying over time, certain parts are more likely to cause performance impairments during playback with a particular rate adaptation algorithm. To address such an issue, we propose Segue, which carefully uses variable-length video segments, and augment specific segments with additional bitrate tracks. The key novelty of our approach is in making such decisions based on the video's time-varying complexity and the expected rate adapt…
Crowdsourced mobile video streaming enables nearby mobile video users to aggregate network resources to improve their video streaming performances. However, users are often selfish and may not be willing to cooperate without proper incentives. Designing an incentive mechanism for such a scenario is challenging due to the users' asynchronous downloading behaviors and their private valuations for multi-bitrate coded videos. In this work, we propose both single-object and multi-object multi-dimensional auction mechanisms, through which users sell the opportunities for downloading single and multi…
The popularity of the video services on the Internet has evolved various mechanisms that target the Quality of Experience (QoE) optimization of video traffic. The video quality has been enhanced through adapting the sending bitrates. However, rate adaptation alone is not sufficient for maintaining a good video QoE when congestion occurs. This paper presents a cross-layer architecture for video streaming that is QoE-aware. It combines adaptation capabilities of video applications and QoE-aware admission control to optimize the trade-off relationship between QoE and the number of admitted sessio…
Multi-connectivity has emerged as a key enabler for providing seamless connectivity in cellular mobile networks. However, its potential for improving the quality of multicast transmissions has remained unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the use of multi-connectivity in wireless multicast streaming. Multi-connectivity can significantly improve the performance of multicast services. It especially benefits the cell edge users who often suffer from poor channel conditions. In this work, we assess the impact of multi-connectivity on the performance of multicast streaming. We propose procedur…
Short video streaming applications have recently gained substantial traction, but the non-linear video presentation they afford swiping users fundamentally changes the problem of maximizing user quality of experience in the face of the vagaries of network throughput and user swipe timing. This paper describes the design and implementation of Dashlet, a system tailored for high quality of experience in short video streaming applications. With the insights we glean from an in-the-wild TikTok performance study and a user study focused on swipe patterns, Dashlet proposes a novel out-of-order video…
Wireless edge networks are promising to provide better video streaming services to mobile users by provisioning computing and storage resources at the edge of wireless network. However, due to the diversity of user interests, user devices, video versions or resolutions, cache sizes, network conditions, etc., it is challenging to decide where to place the video contents, and which cache and video version a mobile user device should select. In this paper, we study the joint optimization of cache-version selection and content placement for adaptive video streaming in wireless edge networks. We pr…
With the growing of Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks and the increase in the demand of the video services, it is vital to consider the challenges in the streaming services from a different perspective. A perspective that focuses on the streaming services in light of cellular networks challenges, both per layer basis and across multiple layers as well. In this tutorial, we highlight the main challenges that faces the industry of video streaming in the context of cellular networks with a focus on LTE. We also discuss proposed solutions for these challenges while highlighting the limit…
We consider the jointly optimal design of a transmission scheduling and admission control policy for adaptive video streaming over small cell networks. We formulate the problem as a dynamic network utility maximization and observe that it naturally decomposes into two subproblems: admission control and transmission scheduling. The resulting algorithms are simple and suitable for distributed implementation. The admission control decisions involve each user choosing the quality of the video chunk asked for download, based on the network congestion in its neighborhood. This form of admission cont…
