Streaming Variable Bitrate Video Over Mobile Networks With Predictable Performance

Mobile video streaming services are ubiquitous today and yet their real-world performance is still largely inconsistent, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, primarily due to mobile networks' inherent bandwidth fluctuations at both short and long timescales. With the rapid emergence of paid streaming services, picture and streaming qualities can no longer be an afterthought. This work develops a novel framework called Variable-Bitrate Post-Streaming Rate Analysis (VBR-PSRA) that, for the first time, enables service providers and mobile operators to provision higher-quality VBR-encoded video streaming services with consistent, predictable, and controllable performance. The VBR-PSRA framework exploits past throughput trace data collected during actual streaming sessions to construct a statistical model that captures and quantifies the relation between recent throughput data, video quality choice, video bitrate variations, and streaming performance. It allows the service provider to set a target streaming performance in terms of playback rebuffering probability where it will then automatically select the best video quality that can be streamed. Extensive simulations using trace data obtained from production 3G/HSPA networks in three different locations showed that the proposed VBR-PSRA framework can achieve actual streaming performances which are remarkably close to the target.