Edge-Assisted Short Video Sharing With Guaranteed Quality-of-Experience

As a rising star of social apps, short video apps, e.g., TikTok, have attracted a large number of mobile users by providing fresh and short video contents that highly match their watching preferences. Meanwhile, the booming growth of short video apps imposes new technical challenges on the existing computation and communication infrastructure. Traditional solutions maintain all videos on the cloud and stream them to users via contend delivery networks or the Internet. However, they incur huge network traffic and long delay that seriously affects users’ watching experiences. In this article, we propose an edge-assisted short video sharing framework to address these challenges by caching some highly preferred videos at edge servers that can be accessed by users via high-speed network connections. Since edge servers have limited computation and storage resources, we design an online algorithm with provable approximation ratio to decide which videos should be cached at edge servers, without the knowledge of future network quality and watching preferences changes. Furthermore, we improve the performance by jointly considering video fetching and user-edge association. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms under various system settings, and the results show that our proposals outperform existing schemes.