Optimizing Quality-of-Experience for HTTP-based Adaptive Video Streaming: An SDN-based Approach

In this work, the authors present a novel bandwidth management solution for optimizing overall quality of experience (QoE) of multiple video streaming sessions. Instead of allocating bandwidth equally among competing flows, they propose to tailor the bandwidth allocation to both content complexity of requested video and playout buffer status of individual clients. The authors formulate the multi-client bandwidth allocation problem within the convex optimization framework, which is flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of video quality metrics. Further, the authors present a practical architecture based on software defined networking (SDN) with two components: video quality monitoring and video quality optimization. Testbed-based experiments confirm that with quality-optimized allocation the network can support up to 75% more users at the same level of quality-of-experience (QoE) than conventional equal-rate allocations.