Deadline-Aware Transmission Control for Real-Time Video Streaming

The deadline requirements of real-time applications rapidly increase in recent years (e.g., cloud gaming, cloud VR, online conferencing). Due to diverse network conditions, meeting deadline requirements for these applications has become one of the research hotspots. However, the current schemes focus on providing high bitrate instead of meeting deadline requirements. In this paper, we propose D3T, a flexible deadline-aware transmission mechanism that aims to improve user quality of experience (QoE) for real-time video streaming. To fulfill the diverse deadline requirements over fluctuating network conditions, D3T uses a deadline-aware scheduler to select the high priority frame before the deadline. To reduce congestion and retransmission delay, we leverage a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to make decisions of sending rate and FEC (forward error correction) redundancy ratio based on observed network status and frame information. We evaluate D3T via trace-driven simulator spanning diverse network environments, video contents and QoE metrics. D3T significantly improves the frame completion rate by reducing the bandwidth waste before the deadline. In the considered scenarios, D3T outperforms previously approaches with the improvements in average QoE of 57%.