With live video streaming becoming accessible in various applications on all client platforms, it is imperative to create a seamless and efficient distribution system that is flexible enough to choose from multiple Internet architectures best suited for video streaming (live, on-demand, AR). In this paper, we highlight the benefits of such a hybrid system for live video streaming as well as present a detailed analysis with the goal to provide a high quality of experience (QoE) for the viewer. For our hybrid architecture, video streaming is supported simultaneously over TCP/IP and Named Data Networking (NDN)-based architecture via operating system and networking virtualization techniques to design a flexible system that utilizes the benefits of these varying Internet architectures. Also, to relieve users from the burden of installing a new protocol stack (in the case of NDN) on their devices, we developed a lightweight solution in the form of a container that includes the network stack as well as the streaming application. At the client, the required Internet architecture (TCP/IP versus NDN) can be selected in a transparent and adaptive manner. Based on a prototype, we have designed and implemented maintaining efficient use of network resources, we demonstrate that in the case of live streaming, NDN achieves better QoE per client than IP and can also utilize higher than allocated bandwidth through in-network caching. Even without caching, as opposed to IP-only, our hybrid setup achieves better average bitrate and better perceived visual quality (computed via VMAF metric) over live video streaming services. Furthermore, we present detailed analysis on ways adaptive video streaming with NDN can be further improved with respect to QoE.
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Application-based QoE support with P4 and OpenFlow
Although Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) are now widely deployed in several production networks, they are largely restricted to traffic engineering ap- proaches based on layer 4 (L4) of the network protocol stack. Such approaches result in improved Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the network overall without necessarily focussing on the requirements of a specific application. However, the emergence of application protocols such as QUIC and HTTP/2 needs an in- vestigation of layer 5-based (L5) approaches in order to improve users’ Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this paper, we leverage the capabilities of flexible, P4-based switches that incorporate protocol-independent packet processing in order to intelligently route traffic based on application headers. We use Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) video streaming as an example to show how such an approach can not only provide flexible traffic management but also improve application QoE. Our evaluation consists of an actual deployment in a research testbed, Chameleon, where we leverage the benefits of fast paths in order to retransmit video segments in higher qualities. Further, we analyze real-world ABR streaming sessions from a large-scale CDN and show that our approach can successfully maximize QoE for all users in the dataset.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1743358
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10107210
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Conference on Computer Communications workshops
- ISSN:
- 2159-4228
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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With live video streaming becoming accessible in various applications on all client platforms, it is imperative to create a seamless and efficient distribution system that is flexible enough to choose from multiple Internet architectures best suited for video streaming (live, on-demand, AR). In this paper, we highlight the benefits of such a hybrid system for live video streaming as well as present a detailed analysis with the goal to provide a high quality of experience (QoE) for the viewer. For our hybrid architecture, video streaming is supported simultaneously over TCP/IP and Named Data Networking (NDN)-based architecture via operating system and networking virtualization techniques to design a flexible system that utilizes the benefits of these varying internet architectures. Also, to relieve users from the burden of installing a new protocol stack (in the case of NDN) on their devices, we developed a lightweight solution in the form of a container that includes the network stack as well as the streaming application. At the client, the required Internet architecture (TCP/IP versus NDN) can be selected in a transparent and adaptive manner. Based on a prototype we have designed and implemented maintaining efficient use of network resources, we demonstrate that in the case of live streaming, NDN achieves better QoE per client than IP and can also utilize higher than allocated bandwidth through in-network caching. Even without caching, our hybrid setup achieves better average bitrate over live video streaming services than its IP-only alternative. Furthermore, we present detailed analysis on ways adaptive video streaming with NDN can be further improved with respect to QoE.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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