Quality-of-experience driven adaptive HTTP media delivery

This paper presents a Quality of Experience (QoE) driven approach for multi-user resource optimization in Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) over next generation wireless networks. Our objective is to enhance the user experience in adaptive HTTP streaming by jointly considering the characteristics of the media content and the available wireless resources in the operator network. Specifically, we propose a proactive QoE-based approach for rewriting the client HTTP requests at a proxy in the mobile network. The advantage of the proposed approach is its applicability for over-the-top (OTT) streaming as it requires no adaptation of the media content. We compare our proposed scheme to both reactive QoE-optimized and to standard-DASH HTTP streaming. Our contributions are: 1) We first show that standard OTT DASH leads to unsatisfactory performance since the content agnostic resource allocation by the LTE scheduler is far from optimal, and we can achieve a clear QoE improvement when considering the content characteristics. 2) We additionally show that proactively rewriting the client requests gives control of the video content adaptation to the network operator which has better information than the client on the load and radio conditions in the cell. This results in additional gains in user perceived video quality. 3) A standard unmodified DASH client remains unaware of the proposed rewriting of the HTTP requests and can decode and play the redirected media segments.