Quality Of Experience Meets Operators Revenue: Dash Aware Management for Mobile Streaming

In this paper, we apply the recent MPEG-DASH SAND standard for streaming-aware networking elements to develop and investigate an integrated mobile network bandwidth management and resource allocation mechanism. It is used to achieve high quality of experience of the mobile streaming users while jointly assuring high revenue operations by the network operator and by the system's video service providers. The Integrated Manager (IM) leverages its DANE functionalities as defined by SAND standard, namely the capability of using feedback from base stations forming a cluster and from streaming clients, to associate to each user both a dynamic Quality of Experience (QoE) related priority and a static Willing-to-Pay factor related to the user service plan. These two metrics are used by the IM to manage resources belonging to the base stations cluster first at a distributed and then at a centralized level. Specifically, the IM is able to statistically share a bandwidth pool among multiple cells of a single operator, and possibly of multiple operators, to allocate at times excess bandwidth for use in certain cells for the purpose of providing enhanced QoE to identified streams. Simulation results show that the users' need for valuable (higher payoff) bandwidth is of statistical and possibly burst nature so that integrated management and statistical sharing of the bandwidth pool by multiple entities becomes highly effective, when compared to a competitive centralized approach.

1. Introduction

Recently, the availability of new 3GPP technical specification [1] for development of Network-assisted Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (SAND) has boosted the potential of network elements for video service providing. Specifically, the capabilities by network elements to access information about the state of ongoing video services are expanded [2], and this paves the way for the development of high quality, high reward video streaming services [3]. In [4], the authors propose a mobile edge computing architecture where the DASH Aware Network Element (DANE) controls scalable video delivery, triggers caching functions, schedules video streams delivery in accordance to cell statistics. In [5], the authors address the problem of mobile video streaming by jointly maximizing the quality perceived by the user, the fairness of service provided to the users and the server load balancing within a multi-server framework by rate adaptation and server selection. In [6], the authors allocate available channel resources to video streaming users according to media data information so as to minimize the stalling probability observed across a lossy network. In [7], the author develop a video control plane aimed at achieving video quality fairness for users with heterogeneous playout devices. In [6], an SDN-based bandwidth broker optimally selects the video quality, the allocated bandwidth and the flow priority based on users' features in terms of actually streamed media, playout device and service priority within a hybrid fiberoptic/coaxial based access network.