Video stalling identification for web live streaming under HTTP-FLV

Abstract

Live broadcasts have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Quality of user Experience (QoE) is a vital quantitative criterion for evaluating user satisfaction while watching live broadcasts, and it is positively correlated with the increase in the income of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Video stalling identification plays a crucial role in the evaluation of QoE. However, encrypted live streaming hides video content, which makes identifying video stalling challenging. Existing studies primarily detect video stalling in a fixed time interval and focus on high-dimensional features. However, the capacity of the client byte buffer is dynamic, resulting in the stalling and non-stalling existing in a certain and fixed stalling time. In addition, the handling time of abundant features causes further latency. We propose Truncation of Dynamic Bytes and non-linear Integrated Modification based on Double Buffers (DB2) to identify video stalling under HTTP-FLV protocol in various network conditions and live types. We pull real-time video to get client buffer parameters and build a dynamic mapping based on the double buffer between network packets and the video playing states. This allows a more objective and precise evaluation of video stalling. We design a new network feature by creating a non-linear relationship between network packets and the client buffer. This is achieved by combining non-linear convergent distribution with basic traffic features. The feature is fed into a lightweight machine learning model to train the classifier, achieving low processing latency and high identification accuracy. The experimental results show that DB2 can achieve 98.91% stalling identification accuracy with 1.256ms operation time in a mixture of live video types, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques.