From network traffic measurements to QoE for internet video

Abstract

Video streaming is a dominant contributor to the global Internet traffic. Consequently, monitoring video streaming Quality of Experience (QoE) is of paramount importance to network providers. Monitoring QoE of video is a challenge as most of the video traffic of today is encrypted. In this paper, we consider this challenge and present an approach based on controlled experimentation and machine learning to estimate QoE from encrypted video traces using network level measurements only. We consider a case of YouTube and play out a wide range of videos under realistic network conditions to build ML models (classification and regression) that predict the subjective MOS (Mean Opinion Score) based on the ITU P.1203 model along with the QoE metrics of startup delay, quality (spatial resolution) of playout and quality variations, and this is using only the underlying network Quality of Service (QoS) features. We comprehensively evaluate our approach with different sets of input network features and output QoE metrics. Overall, our classification models predict the QoE metrics and the ITU MOS with an accuracy of 63-90% while the regression models show low error; the ITU MOS (1–5) and the startup delay (in seconds) are predicted with a root mean square error of 0.33 and 2.66 respectively.