In-Network Video Quality Adaption using Packet Trimming at the Edge

Abstract

This paper describes the effects of running innetwork quality adaption by trimming the packets of layered video streams at the edge. The video stream is transmitted using the BPP transport protocol, which is like UDP, but has been designed to be both amenable to trimming and to provide low-latency and high reliability. The traffic adaption uses the Packet Wash process of BPP on the transmitted Scalable Video Coding (SVC) video streams as they pass through a network function which is BPP-aware and embedded at the edge. Our previous work has either demonstrated the use of SDN controllers to directly implement Packet Wash, or the use of a network function in the core of the network to do the same task. This paper presents the first attempt to deploy and evaluate such a process in the edge. We compare the performance of transmitting video using BPP and the Packet Wash trimming, against alternative transmission schemes, namely TCP, UDP, and HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS). The results demonstrate that providing traffic engineering using in-network quality adaption using packet trimming, provides high quality at the receiver.