Machine-Learning Based Prediction of Next HTTP Request Arrival Time in Adaptive Video Streaming

Continuously monitoring the network activity to proactively recognise possible problems and prevent users QoE degradation is a major concern for network operators, for both mobile radio and home networks. Considering video streaming applications, which generate the majority of overall Internet traffic, monitoring the chunk requests from the video client to the video server is of particular interest, as they not only indicate that a download burst is imminent, but their type (e.g., request of an audio or video chunk) and frequency also allow to estimate which and how much data will be downloaded to the client. In this work, we propose a machine-learning based video streaming traffic monitoring architecture able to i) predict when next uplink request will be issued by the video client and ii) classify the type of next uplink request. We evaluate the system performance on a dataset of more than 900 HTTP adaptive streaming sessions and 15,000 request-response exchanges, where both the predictor of the next request arrival and the request type classifier are fed with lightweight features extracted from encrypted traffic in an online fashion, both in the uplink and downlink directions of the traffic. Results show that i) the system is able to classify the type of a HAS uplink requests with an accuracy greater than 95 % and ii) pipe-lining request type classification and prediction of next request arrival time improves the final prediction performance.