TDS-KRFI: Reference Frame Identification for Live Web Streaming Toward HTTP Flash Video Protocol

Abstract

Live web streaming occupies a large proportion of network traffic, and various live streaming platforms use HTTP-FLV protocol to transmit streaming. The content-aware strategy that includes frame-skipping and frame-dropping mechanisms before client decoding is essential in providing high-quality live video services to improve QoE. Therefore, frame type identification is necessary for content-aware strategy and traffic engineering. The current studies focus on keyframe identification under single datasets. However, they failed to consider the actual scenarios where there are various types of live web streaming with user interactions and only identify keyframes. After studying, we found a type of frame in normal video frames that contain image parameters for subsequent frames, which can also cause a stall if they are dropped or skipped during frame processing, and this type of frame is called a reference frame. To effectively identify keyframes and reference frames, we propose the TDS-KRFI, which extracts lightweight and effective streaming features from the encrypted traffic of live web streaming. Then we use a two-layer double similarity measure to construct the spatio-temporal structure of dynamic data units and use the DGCNN model to identify frame types. In evaluation, we use various datasets with 6,532,890 frames containing user interactions under different webcasting platforms to conduct extensive experiments. It can achieve 99.9% (average 98.96%) accuracy in keyframe identification and 95.7% in all types of frames (keyframes, reference frames, and other frames) within 9.6% of the transmission time, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of our approach and outperforming the state-of-the-art research so far.