No abstract

The end users' satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) is a fundamental criterion for networked video service providers such as video-on-demand providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.), cloud gaming providers (Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, etc.) and videoconferencing providers (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.). To know the QoE, providers today typically predict it from the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters or the client-side's actual QoE metrics measured at the current time-step. But the former does not precisely reflect the users' experience, and the latter has a delay between QoE measurements at the client-side and the user's current experience. Mitigating this delay can provide a noticeable improvement in the delivery system's performance. For example, accurate forecasting of QoE for the near future allows the service management system to take a proactive approach and fix delivery issues before they become a noticeable problem at the end user, or at least reduce overall QoE degradation. QoE forecasting can also be used in rate adaptation in DASH or resource allocation in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a method to prognosticate QoE metrics. Using data collected from an industry video streaming testbed for three different classes, we define a multivariate time series forecasting problem. We then model a hybrid state-of-the-art deep learning method, BiLSTM-CNN, to forecast the QoE metrics in advance. Evaluation of our proposed method compared to four other well-known ML models of Support Vector Regression (SVR), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long short-term memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method.

Cloud Gaming (CG) provides a high performance and cost-effective solution where players with low-end devices can play high-end games without the need for advanced hardware. A cloud-based video game system offloads all the computational tasks to the cloud. Considering the dynamic nature of game workloads and resource capacity, resource management is still a significant challenge. Since CG is a real-time gaming service, graphics processing units (GPUs) are necessary to accelerate game scene rendering. GPUs are one of the most expensive resources in a CG platform. Therefore, service providers have a strong incentive to utilize GPUs efficiently to maximize their economic profit. In addition, players' quality of game experience (QoE) is a crucial parameter that can directly affect a service provider's profit and must be taken into account in any resource scheduling optimization. To satisfy both parties, in this paper we propose two efficient methods for GPU based server selection in CG. The proposed methods are an improved version of two well-known metaheuristic algorithms called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA), which we refer to as Boosted-PSO and Boosted-GA, respectively. The proposed methods consider service providers' profits and players' experience simultaneously. Our objective is to maximize GPU utilization, which will not only lead to the service provider's economic benefit, but also increase the player's QoE. Our simulation results show that compared to the existing methods to solve such an NP-Hard optimization problem, our Boosted-PSO method, followed by Boosted-GA, achieves the highest efficiency in terms of GPU utilization, capacity wastage, and player's QoE.

Maintaining a satisfactory customer Quality of Experience (QoE) is of vital importance for video service providers such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Network faults degrade QoE and must therefore be detected, isolated, and fixed. However, this is difficult because each part of the end-to-end path belongs to a different autonomous system (AS) that is typically owned by a different entity, such as the video streaming provider, the internet service provider (ISP), and the client's local network operator. Although the video service provider (VSP) is usually blamed by the customer when there is poor QoE, the VSP does not have access to many parts of the network to localize the issue. In this paper, we show that with the aid of AI, it is possible for the VSP to localize the network fault without having access to the faulty part and using only QoE metrics. We collected a dataset from an actual video streaming testbed, where multiple videos are streamed from a video server through a simplified ISP network to a client network. Actual faults were generated in both the ISP and the client networks. Using only the QoE metrics measured at the client side, we use the deep learning methods of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and long-short-term memory (LSTM) to detect and localize the fault with an accuracy of 93-97%, depending on the situation.Impact Statement-Technologically, our work impacts video/game streaming service providers such as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Stadia, Sony PlayStation Now, Nvidia GeForce Now, and videoconferencing providers such as Zoom and Skype. Our work enables these providers to train similar AI systems that can localize network problems using only the video quality of experience (QoE) recorded by their client software. They can then take an appropriate action, such as rerouting traffic using Open Connect Appliances (OCA) if available, using another network provider if they have contracts with more than one, or informing the owner of the network segment with the fault, so they can fix the problem and maintain their customers' QoE at a satisfactory level. Economically, our work can contribute to the market expansion of any video streaming solution because it will lead to better QoE, which is synonymous with more customers.