A Distributed Delivery Architecture for User Generated Content Live Streaming over HTTP

Abstract

Live User Generated Content (UGC) has become very popular in today's video streaming applications, in particular with gaming and e-sport. However, streaming UGC presents unique challenges for video delivery. When dealing with the technical complexity of managing hundreds or thousands of concurrent streams that are geographically distributed, UGC systems are forces to made difficult trade-offs with video quality and latency. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a fully distributed architecture for UGC delivery over the Internet, termed QuaLA (joint Quality-Latency Architecture). The proposed architecture aims to jointly optimize video quality and latency for a better user experience and fairness. By using the proximal Jacobi alternating direction method of multipliers (ProxJ-ADMM) technique, QuaLA proposes a fully distributed mechanism to achieve an appropriate solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture through real-world experiments using the CloudLAB testbed. Experimental results show the outperformance of QuaLA in achieving high quality with more than 57% improvement while preserving a good level of fairness and respecting a given target latency among all clients compared to conventional client-driven solutions.