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.
Closer to our work is the methodology presented in @cite_18 , where the target is to predict the class of the play-back buffer level during the video session by defining a set of buffer levels in seconds. Unlike in this work, our focus is the prediction of the buffer state, which is a more fundamental property of adaptive streaming clients.
@cite_18
2622055490
Stalls during video playback are perhaps the most important indicator of a client's viewing experience. To provide the best possible service, a proactive network operator may therefore want to know the buffer conditions of streaming clients and use this information to help avoid stalls due to empty buffers. However, estimation of clients' buffer conditions is complicated by most streaming services being rate-adaptive, and many of them also encrypted. Rate adaptation reduces the correlation between network throughput and client buffer conditions. Usage of HTTPS prevents operators from observing information related to video chunk requests, such as indications of rate adaptation or other HTTP-level information. This paper presents BUFFEST, a novel classification framework that can be used to classify and predict streaming clients' buffer conditions from both HTTP and HTTPS traffic. To illustrate the tradeoffs between prediction accuracy and the available information used by classifiers, we design and evaluate classifiers of different complexity. At the core of BUFFEST is an event-based buffer emulator module for detailed analysis of clients' buffer levels throughout a streaming session, as well as for automated training and evaluation of online packet-level classifiers. We then present example results using simple threshold-based classifiers and machine learning classifiers that only use TCP IP packet-level information. Our results are encouraging and show that BUFFEST can distinguish streaming clients with low buffer conditions from clients with significant buffer margin during a session even when HTTPS is used.