Improve video QoE by practical bandwidth allocation

Wanchun Jiang

doi:10.1007/s00530-024-01577-5

2024-11-27

PRE

DOI：10.1007/s00530-024-01577-5

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摘要

En 中文

Nowadays, when multiple video clients share the same bottleneck link, each client independently maximizes its quality of experience (QoE) via adaptive bitrate algorithm. Besides, congestion control algorithms only provide connection-level fairness. Consequently, the QoEs of different video clients can vary widely, leaving the clients with worse QoEs unsatisfied. To address this issue, video providers would improve the QoE fairness among multiple clients to significantly enhance the minimum QoE. Nevertheless, existing solutions are impractical due to either deployment challenges or significant computational overhead. Therefore, we propose the practical bandwidth allocation (PBA) mechanism for video providers to improve the minimum QoE of clients in this paper. Specifically, PBA formulates QoE by considering the impacts of both network conditions and playback devices. Additionally, PBA reconfigures the congestion control algorithm on servers, according to the piggybacked QoE from clients. In this distributive manner, PBA can rapidly converge to the bandwidth allocation with great QoE fairness. Real-world experiments demonstrate that PBA improves the QoE fairness and increases the minimum QoE of clients by 20.6% and 16.6% on average compared with Cubic and Copa, respectively. Moreover, the performance advantage of PBA is confirmed extensively under diverse network conditions.

Keyword:

Video streaming

Quality of experience

Fairness

Bandwidth allocation