Uplink-based Live Session Model for Stalling Prediction in Video Streaming

Today, video streaming is responsible for about 50 % of all Internet traffic worldwide. To cope with this massive amount of video streaming data, a major concern of network providers is the development of efficient traffic monitoring and management techniques. However, fast and efficient monitoring which leads to intelligent management decisions is becoming highly resource intense and complex, due to the steady increase of the number of streamed videos and the quality of the streamed content. Considering HTTP adaptive streaming applications, we present a simple machine learning free, uplink request based approach to estimate drops in the video playback butter. These drops are the first indicator leading to quality impairment events like downwards quality changes or stalling. With our approach, instead of analyzing thousands of encrypted packets in the network, we only need to consider one single packet every 5 s-10s on average, depending on the video chunk size and independently of the played resolution. Nevertheless, we are able to detect nearly all stalling events or consider a trade-off between stalling detection recall and false positives. Our approach can be implemented completely moving average based, thus not requiring any parameter setup or other expert knowledge. Due to its simplicity, it can be deployed on any access point to collect streaming quality information that is useful for active network management and intelligent resource provisioning but also in a data center to analyze a massive number of parallel video flows.