Accurate cross-layer information is very useful to optimize mobile networks for specific applications. However, providing application-layer information to lower protocol layers has become very difficult due to the wide adoption of end-to-end encryption and due to the absence of cross-layer signaling standards. As an alternative, this paper presents a traffic profiling solution to passively estimate parameters of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) applications at the lower layers. By observing IP packet arrivals, our machine learning system identifies video flows and detects the state of an HAS client's play-back buffer in real time. Our experiments with YouTube's mobile client show that Random Forests achieve very high accuracy even with a strong variation of link quality. Since this high performance is achieved at IP level with a small, generic feature set, our approach requires no Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), comes at low complexity, and does not interfere with end-to-end encryption. Traffic profiling is, thus, a powerful new tool for monitoring and managing even encrypted HAS traffic in mobile networks.
When it comes to video streaming, most of the recent works propose to distinguish the entire video session into different classes. For example, the authors in @cite_4 propose a system that monitors application-level quality indicators and corresponding traffic traces to classify YouTube videos into three QoE classes. Similarly, different levels of QoE are studied in @cite_22 with the focus on stalling, average video quality and quality variations as the key influence factors. A causal analysis between QoE and Quality of Service (QoS) is presented in @cite_27 with features from application and network-layer QoS metrics, while an approach to discriminate between audio and video HAS flows is proposed in @cite_12 . Compared to these studies that classify an entire video session into a single category, our classification is performed at a higher temporal resolution by estimating dynamic video traffic parameters in real time.
@cite_27 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_12
2610855322 2150396122 2766773582 2748103247
Due to the widespread use of encryption in Over-The-Top video streaming traffic, network operators generally lack insight into application-level quality indicators (e.g., video quality levels, buffer underruns, stalling duration). They are thus faced with the challenge of finding solutions for monitoring service performance and estimating customer Quality of Experience (QoE) degradations based solely on passive monitoring solutions deployed within their network. We address this challenge by considering the concrete case of YouTube, whereby we present a methodology for the classification of end users' QoE when watching YouTube videos, based only on statistical properties of encrypted network traffic. We have developed a system called YouQ which includes tools for monitoring and analysis of application-level quality indicators and corresponding traffic traces. Collected data is then used for the development of machine learning models for QoE classification based on computed traffic features per video session. To test the YouQ system and methodology, we collected a dataset corresponding to 1060 different YouTube videos streamed across 39 different bandwidth scenarios, and tested various classification models. Classification accuracy was found to be up to 84 when using three QoE classes ("low", "medium" or "high") and up to 91 when using binary classification (classes "low" and "high"). To improve the models in the future, we discuss why and when prediction errors occur. Moreover, we have analysed YouTube's adaptation algorithm, thus providing valuable insight into the logic behind the quality level selection strategy, which may also be of interest in improving future QoE estimation algorithms. Managing the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) of video streaming for wireless clients is becoming increasingly important due to the rapid growth of video traffic on wireless networks. The inherent variability of the wireless channel as well as the Variable Bit Rate (VBR) of the compressed video streams make QoE management a challenging problem. Prior work has studied this problem in the context of transmitting a single video stream. In this paper, we investigate multiplexing schemes to transmit multiple video streams from a base station to mobile clients that use number of playout stalls as a performance metric. In this context, we present an epoch-by-epoch framework to fairly allocate wireless transmission slots to streaming videos. In each epoch our scheme essentially reduces the vulnerability to stalling by allocating slots to videos in a way that maximizes the minimum ‘playout lead’ across all videos. Next, we show that the problem of allocating slots fairly is NP-complete even for a constant number of videos. We then present a fast lead-aware greedy algorithm for the problem. Our choice of greedy algorithm is motivated by the fact that this algorithm is optimal when the channel quality of a user remains unchanged within an epoch (but different users may experience different channel quality). Moreover, our experimental results based on public MPEG-4 video traces and wireless channel traces that we collected from a WiMAX test-bed show that the lead-aware greedy approach performs a fair distribution of stalls across the clients when compared to other algorithms, while still maintaining similar or lower average number of stalls per client. Over-the-top mobile adaptive video streaming is invariably influenced by volatile network conditions, which can cause playback interruptions (stalling or rebuffering events) and bitrate fluctuations, thereby impairing users’ quality of experience (QoE). Video quality assessment models that can accurately predict users’ QoE under such volatile network conditions are rapidly gaining attention, since these methods could enable more efficient design of quality control protocols for media-driven services such as YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, and many others. However, the development of improved QoE prediction models requires data sets of videos afflicted with diverse stalling events that have been labeled with ground-truth subjective opinion scores. Toward this end, we have created a new mobile video quality database that we call LIVE Mobile Stall Video Database-II. Our database contains a total of 174 videos afflicted with distortions caused by 26 different stalling patterns. We describe the way we simulated the diverse stalling events to create a corpus of distorted videos, and we detail the human study we conducted to obtain continuous-time subjective scores from 54 subjects. We also present the outcomes of our comprehensive analysis of the impact of several factors that influence subjective QoE, and report the performance of existing QoE-prediction models on our data set. We are making the database (videos, subjective data, and video metadata) publicly available in order to help the advance state-of-the-art research on user-centric mobile network planning and management. The database may be accessed at http: live.ece.utexas.edu research LIVEStallStudy liveMobile.html . A continuous evaluation of the end user’s quality-of-experience (QoE) is essential for efficient video streaming. This is crucial for networks with constrained resources that offer time-varying channel quality to its users. In hypertext transfer protocol-based video streaming, the QoE is measured by quantifying the perceptual impact of distortions caused by rate adaptation or interruptions in playback due to rebuffering events. The resulting impact on the QoE due to these distortions has been studied individually in the literature. However, the QoE is determined by an interplay of these distortions, and therefore necessitates a combined study of them. To the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available database that studies these distortions jointly on a continuous time basis. In this paper, our contributions are twofold. First, we present a database consisting of videos at full high definition and ultrahigh definition resolutions. We consider various levels of rate adaptation and rebuffering distortions together in these videos as experienced in a typical realistic setting. A subjective evaluation of these videos is conducted on a continuous time scale. Second, we present a QoE evaluation framework comprising a learning-based model during playback and an exponential model during rebuffering. Furthermore, we perform an objective evaluation of popular video quality assessment and continuous time QoE metrics over the constructed database. The objective evaluation study demonstrates that the performance of the proposed QoE model is superior to that of the objective metrics. The database is publicly available for download at http: www.iith.ac.in lfovia downloads.html .