Mobile video streaming with video quality and streaming performance guarantees

Abstract

Mobile video streaming has become a mainstream application due to vastly improved smartphone hardware and mobile network capacity in recent years. Nevertheless, mobile video streaming remains challenging in practice due to mobile network's inherent bandwidth fluctuations. This work tackles two long-standing challenges in mobile video streaming, namely to provision streaming services with predictable streaming performance and guaranteed video quality. In contrast to existing approaches based on adaptive video streaming, we show that today's mobile networks, despite the seemingly random bandwidth fluctuations, do exhibit statistically significant correlations over short and long time-scales. By developing a new framework to correlate the statistical correlations between video bitrate, streaming performance, and startup delay, we show that it is both possible and practical to achieve the above two goals by adaptively configuring the startup delay. Trace-driven simulations based on bandwidth traces captured from production 3G networks show that the proposed framework can readily achieve both streaming performance and video quality guarantees in today's mobile networks.