Heavy-Traffic Analysis of

QoE Optimality for OnDemand Video Streams

Over Fading Channels
P.C. Hsieh and I.H. Hou, Texas University, USA
Francesco Bini

27/07/16

Abstract
This paper proposes scheduling policies to optimize QoE for VoD
over fading channel
QoE is measured by the duration of video playback interruption, in
particular in heavy traffic regime
First they consider ON-OFF channel, using a special scheduling
policy
A new policy is finally used over a fading channel and the results

Introduction
According to the latest research of Cisco, video services will
occupy three-fourths of global mobile traffic in near future
So, new scheduling policies are necessary to serve an increasing
number of users
New policy goal: find a good compromise between initial
prefetching delay and playback buffer emptiness
Here, the analysis considers the long-term average performance
and also the short term QoE performance.

Introduction
The analysis starts from special case of ON-OFF channel
It continues in the case of general fading channel
Characterize the capacity region for QoE and propose the
scheduling policy, that can achieve every interior point in the
capacity region
Finally, there is a comparation of the proposed policy with three
popular policies

System Model

They consider N clients, downloading a VoD through an Access

Point and a wireless link.
A playback interruption arrives when the playback buffer has not
enough bit to reproduce a frame.
where is the content of playback buffer and are the bits composing
a frame
=
where is the number of bits arrived at time t and is the total
number of frame played in time t.
If =0 the user experiences an interruption.

System Model
Let be the total number of video interruption in time t.
Def: A video streaming system is said stabilizable if there is a
scheduling policy such
that:
This will happen if and only if the throughput of each client is at
least equal to
Studying the stability it is the same of studying the reachable

Stability Region for ON-OFF

Channels
The transmission rate may be either zero or r
Theorem:
A video streaming system with ON-OFF channel is stabilizable if and
only if:
, where is the event that client n has ON channel
In other words, the probability of ON channel must be larger than
the number of bits extracted by the buffer, normalized with r.

Heavy-Traffic Analysis for ON-OFF Channel

We are particularly interested at the edge condition of the stability
region where:

So, we obtain a lower bound of for the dynamic interruption video

seen from the clients.
A vector is said feasible if:
Capacity region for QoE, , is defined as the set of feasible

Joint Channel-Deficit Policy (JCD)

This policy is one of proposals of this research work
The AP schedules first the client with the lowest value of , where is
a predetermined weighted factor and , so it is arrived bits minus
reproduced bits at time t
It is possible to prove that JCD policy is able to achieve every
interior point in the capacity region choosing the right factor.

Heavy-Traffic Analysis for General

Fading Channel
Here the stability region can not be determined with a condition,
as in ON-OFF channels
It is necessary to made some assumption to simplify the problem

Even in this kind of channels the capacity region is composed by

the set of feasible

Highest Data Rate Policy (HDR)

It is a generalized version of JCD

The scheduling policy facilitates the clients with the highest and in
case of stall it chooses the one with the lowest .
Also in HDR it is possible to demonstrate that all the capacity
region is achievable making the same assumption as before

Simulation Results
In the paper was made a comparison with popular policies using a
simulator ns-2
Simulation conditions:
Time to transmit a packet and receive an ACK is 500s
Packet dimension are various
Frame rate 30 fps
Every client reproduces a frame every 66 timeslot

Simulation Results
The policy HDR is compared with:
1. Max Weight Policy (MW)
2. Weighted Proportional-Fair (WPF)
3. NOVA Algorithm
.The first step is made considering a system of 20 clients in heavy
traffic conditions
.In the second step they equally divide the clients in two classes

Simulation First Step

From Fig. 1 it is possible to see that HDR exhibit the lowest
playback interruption and also the lowest total penalty, respect
the other policies
In particular Max Weight and NOVA shows bad results in term of
playback interruption

Simulation Second Step

At the clients of Class 1 is assigned a value of=10 and for the Class
2,=1
This choice will give a better performance of QoE at Class 1
Then we suppose that Class 1 clients use a video resolution of 480p
while Class 2 uses 720p
According to YouTube recommendation, it is choosen =156 byte/slot for
720p and =78 byte/slot for 480p videos

Simulation Second Step

Like in the symmetric case, HDR is the best policy. Video interruptions increase
faster for MW and NOVA respect HDR for both the classes
WPF has a bad behavior for Class 1 clients, because it can achieve only a single
point in capacity region
All the policies analyzed are stabilizable because the video interruption increases
sublinearly, but the short-term performance are substantially different

Conclusion
In this paper there is a study on dynamic behavior of QoE under
heavy-traffic conditions
There are some proposals of scheduling policies for optimizing QoE
The simulations shows that the new proposal (HDR) has much
better performance respect the existing policies and it is a valid
solution for future implementations

Thanks for your attention