Achieving QoE Fairness in Video Streaming via Client-Network Interaction

Adaptive video streams, when competing behind a single bottleneck link, experience unstable video quality, underutilized links, and unfair distribution of bandwidth. Different classes of solution have been proposed. On client side, bitrate adaptation algorithms have been designed to minimize the video bitrate changes as well as attain as high bitrate as the network resources allow. On the server side, efforts have been made to optimize the efficiency in Content Delivery Network (CDN) server caching and selection. However, those approaches do not account for the problem of unfairness because they are unaware of competing video streams. Network services have been proposed to bridge this gap, but the wide spread use of HTTPS renders those solutions ineffective, even impossible. In this work, we present client-Driven Video Delivery (cDVD), an in-network service for video streaming over HTTPS that builds on software-defined principles. cDVD provides client-level APIs that enable the interaction between clients and network even in the presence of HTTPS, and uses the exchanged information to achieve stability, high bandwidth utilization, and fairness when multiple video clients share the same access link.