DataPlanner

Abstract

Over-the-top video (OTT) streaming accounts for the majority of traffic on cellular networks, and also places a heavy demand on users' limited monthly cellular data budgets. In contrast to much of traditional research that focuses on improving the quality, we explore a different direction---using data budget information to better manage the data usage of mobile video streaming, while minimizing the impact on users' quality of experience (QoE). Specifically, we propose a novel framework for quality-aware Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming involving a per-session data budget constraint. Under the framework, we develop two planning based strategies, one for the case where fine-grained perceptual quality information is known to the planning scheme, and another for the case where such information is not available. Evaluations for a wide range of network conditions, using different videos covering a variety of content types and encodings, demonstrate that both these strategies use much less data compared to state-of-the-art ABR schemes, while still providing comparable QoE. Our proposed approach is designed to work in conjunction with existing ABR streaming workflows, enabling ease of adoption.