VidCloud: Joint Stall and Quality Optimization for Video Streaming over Cloud

Abstract

As video-streaming services have expanded and improved, cloud-based video has evolved into a necessary feature of any successful business for reaching internal and external audiences. In this article, video streaming over distributed storage is considered where the video segments are encoded using an erasure code for better reliability. We consider a representative system architecture for a realistic (typical) content delivery network (CDN). Given multiple parallel streams/link between each server and the edge router, we need to determine, for each client request, the subset of servers to stream the video, as well as one of the parallel streams from each chosen server. To have this scheduling, this article proposes a two-stage probabilistic scheduling. The selection of video quality is also chosen with a certain probability distribution that is optimized in our algorithm. With these parameters, the playback time of video segments is determined by characterizing the download time of each coded chunk for each video segment. Using the playback times, a bound on the moment generating function of the stall duration is used to bound the mean stall duration. Based on this, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly optimize the convex combination of mean stall duration and average video quality for all requests, where the two-stage probabilistic scheduling, video quality selection, bandwidth split among parallel streams, and auxiliary bound parameters can be chosen. This non-convex problem is solved using an efficient iterative algorithm. Based on the offline version of our proposed algorithm, an online policy is developed where servers selection, quality, bandwidth split, and parallel streams are selected in an online manner. Experimental results show significant improvement in QoE metrics for cloud-based video as compared to the considered baselines.