User-perceived quality-of-experience (QoE) is critical in internet video delivery systems. Extensive prior work has studied the design of client-side bitrate adaptation algorithms to maximize single-player QoE. However, multiplayer QoE fairness becomes critical as the growth of video traffic makes it more likely that multiple players share a bottleneck in the network. Despite several recent proposals, there is still a series of open questions. In this paper, we bring the problem space to light from a control theory perspective by formalizing the multiplayer QoE fairness problem and addressing two key questions in the broader problem space. First, we derive the sufficient conditions of convergence to steady state QoE fairness under TCP-based bandwidth sharing scheme. Based on the insight from this analysis that in-network active bandwidth allocation is needed, we propose a non-linear MPC-based, router-assisted bandwidth allocation algorithm that regards each player as closed-loop systems. We use trace-driven simulation to show the improvement over existing approaches. We identify several research directions enabled by the control theoretic modeling and envision that control theory can play an important role on guiding real system design in adaptive video streaming.
Recent studies observe that competing adaptive video streaming applications generate flows that lead to instability, under-utilization, and unfairness in bottleneck link sharing within the network. Additional measurements suggest there may also be a negative impact on users' perceived quality of service as a consequence. While it may be intuitive to resolve application-generated issues at the application layer, in this paper we explore the merits of a network layer solution. We are motivated by the observation that traditional network-layer metrics associated with throughput, loss, and delay are inadequate to the task. To bridge this gap we present a network-layer QoS framework for adaptive streaming video fairness that reflect the video user's quality of experience (QoE). We begin first by deriving a new measure to describe user-level fairness among competing flows, one that reflects the dynamics between the video encoding and its mapping to a screen with a given size and resolution. We then design and implement our framework in VHS (Video-Home-Shaper) to evaluate performance in the home's last access hop where this problem is known to exist. Experiments using a variety of devices, O S platforms, and viewing screens demonstrate the merits of using video QoE as a basis for fair bandwidth sharing.