QoE-Assured 4K HTTP Live Streaming via Transient Segment Holding at Mobile Edge

Abstract

Abstract-HTTP-based live streaming has become increasingly popular in recent years, and more users have started generating 4K live streams from their devices (e.g., mobile phones) through social-media service providers like Facebook or YouTube. If the audience is located far from a live stream source across the global Internet, TCP throughput becomes substantially suboptimal due to slow-start and congestion control mechanisms. This is especially the case when the end-to-end content delivery path involves radio access network (RAN) at the last mile. As a result, the data rate perceived by a mobile receiver may not meet the high requirement of 4K video streams, which causes deteriorated Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this paper, we propose a scheme named Edge-based Transient Holding of Live sEgment (ETHLE), which addresses the issue above by performing context-aware transient holding of video segments at the mobile edge with virtualized content caching capability. Through holding the minimum number of live video segments at the mobile edge cache in a context-aware manner, the ETHLE scheme is able to achieve seamless 4K live streaming experiences across the global Internet by eliminating buffering and substantially reducing initial startup delay and live stream latency. It has been deployed as a virtual network function at an LTE-A network, and its performance has been evaluated using real live stream sources that are distributed around the world. The significance of this paper is that by leveraging virtualized caching resources at the mobile edge, we address the conventional transport-layer bottleneck and enable QoE-assured Internet-wide live streaming services with high data rate requirements.Index Terms-HTTP live streaming, mobile edge computing, network function virtualization, quality of experience, video caching

QoE Management of Multimedia Streaming Services in Future Networks: A Tutorial and Survey

“…QoE-aware/driven Adaptive Streaming over MEC QoE-aware software driven multi-access edge service management [35], [266]- [268], [271], [273], [275], [303] Decrease the content delivery latency and improve the utilization of the network resources. Enable QoE monitoring and video quality adaptation using the real-time knowledge of UEs and network.…”

The Role of Caching in Future Communication Systems and Networks

“…Similarly, [90] studies HTTP-based live streaming services where mobile devices request ultra-high video quality. In these services the end-users often have deteriorated Qualityof-Experience due to the employed congestion control mechanisms in TCP.…”

QoE-Assured Live Streaming via Satellite Backhaul in 5G Networks

“…As mentioned in Section II, in order to assure live streaming users' QoE at the MEC server, context-aware transient segment holding (first proposed in [9]) is performed on a per-streamingsession-basis. In a nutshell, a live streaming client periodically requests the video stream's manifest file from the live origin, so that it can learn about newly-produced segments as soon as possible.…”

“…It also breaks the end-to-end (E2E) content delivery path into two segments, i.e., satellite backhaul and 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). This not only significantly reduces initial startup delay, but also offers better content delivery performance [4], [9]. • Each MEC server monitors the active live streaming sessions under its coverage, especially their real-time QoE status such as buffering and video quality.…”

“…• Each MEC server monitors the active live streaming sessions under its coverage, especially their real-time QoE status such as buffering and video quality. Based on these contexts, it performs necessary content operations such as transient segment holding [9] etc, which provide customized, context-aware QoE assurance on a per-user, persession basis. Meanwhile, it may perform transport-layer performance enhancement techniques to complement the application-layer QoE assurance above.…”