Real-time interactive video streaming applications like cloud-based video games, AR, and VR require high quality video streams and extremely low end-to-end interaction delays. These requirements cause the QoE to be extremely sensitive to packet losses. Due to the inter-dependency between compressed frames, packet losses stall the video decode pipeline until the lost packets are retransmitted (resulting in stutters and higher delays), or the decoder state is reset using IDR-frames (lower video quality for given bandwidth). Prism is a hybrid predictive-reactive packet loss recovery scheme that uses a split-stream video coding technique to meet the needs of ultra-low latency video streaming applications. Prism's approach enables aggressive loss prediction, rapid loss recovery, and high video quality post-recovery, with zero overhead during normal operation - avoiding the pitfalls of existing approaches. Our evaluation on real video game footage shows that Prism reduces the penalty of using I-frames for recovery by 81%, while achieving 30% lower delay than pure retransmission-based recovery.
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Drop the packets: using coarse-grained data to detect video performance issues
Understanding end-user video Quality of Experience (QoE) is important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Existing work presents mechanisms that use network measurement data to estimate video QoE. Most of these mechanisms assume access to packet-level traces, the most-detailed data available from the network. However, collecting packet-level traces can be challenging at a network-wide scale. Therefore, we ask: "Is it feasible to estimate video QoE with lightweight, readily-available, but coarse-grained network data?" We specifically consider data in the form of Transport Layer Security (TLS) transactions that can be collected using a standard proxy and present a machine learning-based methodology to estimate QoE. Our evaluation with three popular streaming services shows that the estimation accuracy using TLS transactions is high (up to 72%) with up to 85% recall in detecting low QoE (low video quality or high re-buffering) instances. Compared to packet traces, the estimation accuracy (recall) is 7% (9%) lower but has up to 60 times lower computation overhead.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909040
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10296404
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of ACM Conext
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 71 to 77
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3386367.3431294
