APL: Adaptive Preloading of Short Video with Lyapunov Optimization

Abstract

Short video applications, like TikTok, have attracted many users across the world. It can feed short videos based on users' preferences and allow users to slide the boring content anywhere and anytime. To reduce the loading time and keep playback smoothness, most of the short video apps will preload the recommended short videos in advance. However, these apps preload short videos in fixed size and fixed order, which can lead to huge playback stall and huge bandwidth waste. To deal with these problems, we present an Adaptive Preloading mechanism for short videos based on Lyapunov Optimization, also called APL, to achieve near-optimal playback experience, i.e., maximizing playback smoothness and minimizing bandwidth waste considering users' sliding behaviors. Specifically, we make three technical contributions: (1) We design a novel short video streaming framework which can dynamically preload the recommended short videos before the current video is downloaded completely. (2) We formulate the preloading problem into a playback experience optimization problem to maximize the playback smoothness and minimize the bandwidth waste. (3) We transform the playback experience optimization problem during the whole viewing process into a single-step greedy algorithm based on the Lyapunov optimization theory to make the online decisions during playback. Through extensive experiments based on the real datasets that generously provided by TikTok, we demonstrate that APL can reduce the stall ratio by 81%/12% and bandwidth waste by 11%/31% compared with no-preloading/fixed-preloading mechanism.