Distributed-collaborative managed dash video services

Abstract

We propose a new distributed-collaborative managed DASH video service architecture over software defined networks (SDN) that enables fair and stable video quality to heterogeneous resolution clients. The proposed service is managed by the video service provider (VSP) in collaboration with the network service provider (NSP), where groups of clients sharing a network slice with a reserved throughput collaborate with each other to compute their own fair-share bitrates. Our novel distributed service architecture allows each client to share its buffer status with other clients in the same collaboration group so that each client can estimate a group-buffer-status aware fair-share bitrate, enforce this rate by TCP receive-window size control over a network slice reserved for the group, and perform application-level DASH video rate adaptation that is consistent with this enforced fair bitrate. Experimental results show that the proposed collaborative video service outperforms the traditional competitive DASH clients in terms of (i) minimizing quality fluctuations per client, (ii) fairness among heterogeneous DASH clients, and (iii) maximizing the total goodput of reserved network slice.