Case Study of Internet Links: What Degrades Video QoE?

Recently, there has been increasing demand for video streams with high perceptual quality. The capability of present day Internet links in delivering high perceptual quality streaming services, however, is not completely understood. This paper presents a trace driven study to understand QoE capabilities of present day Internet links using 51 diverse ISPs with a major presence in US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. We study a rich collection of their intra-domain links and inter-domain peering links from 38 vantage points in the Internet using both passive tracing and active probing. We provide the first measurements of link level degradations from a multimedia standpoint. While we observe that ISP are internally well connected and their present peering policies are highly conducive to streaming services, the overall perceptual quality delivered is below "acceptable". Our results indicate that the fault lies with poor intra-domain traffic engineering, BGP, and the usage of AS-path lengths as the routing metric. We also provide a comprehensive case study for every scenario we investigate. Streaming services apart, our Internet measurement results can be used as an input to a variety of research problems.