skip to main content
10.1145/3131365.3131386acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesimcConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Dissecting VOD services for cellular: performance, root causes and best practices

Published: 01 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has emerged as the predominant technique for transmitting video over cellular for most content providers today. While mobile video streaming is extremely popular, delivering good streaming experience over cellular networks is technically very challenging, and involves complex interacting factors. We conduct a detailed measurement study of a wide cross-section of popular streaming video-on-demand (VOD) services to develop a holistic understanding of these services' design and performance. We identify performance issues and develop effective practical best practice solutions to mitigate these challenges. By extending the understanding of how different, potentially interacting components of service design impact performance, our findings can help developers build streaming services with better performance.

References

[1]
2012. ISO/IEC 23009-1, Information technology - Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c057623_ISO_IEC_23009--1_2012.zip. (2012).
[2]
2014. ExoPlayer: Adaptive video streaming on Android - YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VjF638VObA. (2014).
[3]
2016. Choosing the Optimal Segment Duration. https://streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/choosing-the-optimal-segment-duration.html. (2016).
[4]
2016. ExoPlayer 2 - Why, what and when? https://medium.com/google-exoplayer/exoplayer-2-x-why-what-and-when-74fd9cb139. (2016).
[5]
2016. ExoPlayer from the other side. https://medium.com/google-exoplayer/exoplayer-from-the-other-side-5909553abae2. (2016).
[6]
2016. WhatsApp For Android Devices. https://tech.blorge.com/2016/09/23/whatsapp-2-16-274-download-available/-android-devices-new-emojis/155538. (2016).
[7]
2017. BBC DASH Testcard Stream. http://rdmedia.bbc.co.uk/dash/ondemand/testcard/. (2017).
[8]
2017. Building Periscope for Android. http://nerds.airbnb.com/building-periscope-for-android/. (2017).
[9]
2017. CBR and VBREncoding FAQ: What is The Difference? https://www.lifewire.com/difference-between-cbr-and-vbr-encoding-2438423. (2017).
[10]
2017. Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2016--2021 White Paper. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/mobile-white-paper-c11-520862.html. (2017).
[11]
2017. Curl: command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. https://curl.haxx.se. (2017).
[12]
2017. Experience Shapes Mobile Customer Loyalty - Ericsson. https://www.ericsson.com/thinkingahead/consumerlab/consumer-insights/experience-shapes-mobile-customer-loyalty. (2017).
[13]
2017. How Xposed works. https://github.com/rovo89/XposedBridge/wiki/Development-tutorial. (2017).
[14]
2017. Sintel - Open Movie by Blender Foundation. https://durian.blender.org/download/. (2017).
[15]
2017. Smooth Streaming Protocol. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff469518.aspx. (2017).
[16]
2017. Technical Note TN2224. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2224/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40009745-CH1-BITRATERECOMMENDATIONS. (2017).
[17]
Saamer Akhshabi, Ali C Begen, and Constantine Dovrolis. 2011. An experimental evaluation of rate-adaptation algorithms in adaptive streaming over HTTP. In Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Multimedia systems. ACM, 157--168.
[18]
Qi Alfred Chen, Haokun Luo, Sanae Rosen, Z Morley Mao, Karthik Iyer, Jie Hui, Kranthi Sontineni, and Kevin Lau. 2014. Qoe doctor: Diagnosing mobile app qoe with automated ui control and cross-layer analysis. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 151--164.
[19]
Luca De Cicco and Saverio Mascolo. 2010. An experimental investigation of the Akamai adaptive video streaming. In Symposium of the Austrian HCI and Usability Engineering Group. Springer, 447--464.
[20]
Giorgos Dimopoulos, Pere Barlet-Ros, and Josep Sanjuas-Cuxart. 2013. Analysis of youtube user experience from passive measurements. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM 2013). IEEE, 260--267.
[21]
Giorgos Dimopoulos, Ilias Leontiadis, Pere Barlet-Ros, and Konstantina Papagiannaki. 2016. Measuring Video QoE from Encrypted Traffic". In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 513--526.
[22]
Giorgos Dimopoulos, Ilias Leontiadis, Pere Barlet-Ros, Konstantina Papagiannaki, and Peter Steenkiste. 2015. Identifying the Root Cause of Video Streaming Issues on Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies: 1--4 December, 2015: Heidelberg, Germany. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
[23]
Mojgan Ghasemi, Partha Kanuparthy, Ahmed Mansy, Theophilus Benson, and Jennifer Rexford. 2016. Performance Characterization of a Commercial Video Streaming Service. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM.
[24]
Yihua Guo, Ashkan Nikravesh, Z Morley Mao, Feng Qian, and Subhabrata Sen. 2017. Accelerating Multipath Transport Through Balanced Subflow Completion. In Proceedings of the 23th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking. ACM.
[25]
Yihua Guo, Feng Qian, Qi Alfred Chen, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, and Subhabrata Sen. 2016. Understanding on-device bufferbloat for cellular upload. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 303--317.
[26]
Gonca Gürsun, Mark Crovella, and Ibrahim Matta. 2011. Describing and forecasting video access patterns. In INFOCOM, 2011 Proceedings IEEE. IEEE, 16--20.
[27]
TY Huang, R Johari, N McKeown, M Trunnell, and M Watson. 2014. A buffer-based approach to rate adaptation. In Proc. 2014 ACM Conference on SIGCOMM, SIGCOMM, Vol. 14. 187--198.
[28]
Te-Yuan Huang, Nikhil Handigol, Brandon Heller, Nick McKeown, and Ramesh Johari. 2012. Confused, timid, and unstable: picking a video streaming rate is hard. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference. ACM, 225--238.
[29]
Yunhan Jack Jia, Qi Alfred Chen, Zhuoqing Morley Mao, Jie Hui, Kranthi Sontinei, Alex Yoon, Samson Kwong, and Kevin Lau. 2015. Performance characterization and call reliability diagnosis support for voice over lte. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. ACM, 452--463.
[30]
Junchen Jiang, Vyas Sekar, Ion Stoica, and Hui Zhang. 2013. Shedding light on the structure of internet video quality problems in the wild. In Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies. ACM, 357--368.
[31]
Junchen Jiang, Vyas Sekar, and Hui Zhang. 2012. Improving fairness, efficiency, and stability in http-based adaptive video streaming with festive. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies. ACM, 97--108.
[32]
S Shunmuga Krishnan and Ramesh K Sitaraman. 2013. Video stream quality impacts viewer behavior: inferring causality using quasi-experimental designs. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 21, 6 (2013), 2001--2014.
[33]
Zhi Li, Xiaoqing Zhu, Joshua Gahm, Rong Pan, Hao Hu, Ali C Begen, and David Oran. 2014. Probe and adapt: Rate adaptation for http video streaming at scale. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 32, 4 (2014), 719--733.
[34]
Chenghao Liu, Imed Bouazizi, and Moncef Gabbouj. 2011. Rate adaptation for adaptive HTTP streaming. In Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Multimedia systems. ACM, 169--174.
[35]
Yao Liu, Sujit Dey, Fatih Ulupinar, Michael Luby, and Yinian Mao. 2015. Deriving and validating user experience model for dash video streaming. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting 61, 4 (2015), 651--665.
[36]
Ahmed Mansy, Mostafa Ammar, Jaideep Chandrashekar, and Anmol Sheth. 2014. Characterizing client behavior of commercial mobile video streaming services. In Proceedings of Workshop on Mobile Video Delivery. ACM, 8.
[37]
RKP Mok, EWW Chan, and RKC Chang. 2011. Improving TCP video streaming QoE by network QoS management. (2011).
[38]
Ricky KP Mok, Edmond WW Chan, Xiapu Luo, and Rocky KC Chang. 2011. Inferring the QoE of HTTP video streaming from user-viewing activities. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Measurements up the stack. ACM, 31--36.
[39]
Ricky KP Mok, Weichao Li, and Rocky KC Chang. 2016. IRate: Initial video bitrate selection system for HTTP streaming. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 34, 6 (2016), 1914--1928.
[40]
Hyunwoo Nam, Bong Ho Kim, Doru Calin, and Henning Schulzrinne. 2013. A mobile video traffic analysis: Badly designed video clients can waste network bandwidth. In Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps), 2013 IEEE. IEEE, 506--511.
[41]
Ana Nika, Yibo Zhu, Ning Ding, Abhilash Jindal, Y Charlie Hu, Xia Zhou, Ben Y Zhao, and Haitao Zheng. 2015. Energy and performance of smartphone radio bundling in outdoor environments. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 809--819.
[42]
Ashkan Nikravesh, Yihua Guo, Feng Qian, Z Morley Mao, and Subhabrata Sen. 2016. An in-depth understanding of multipath TCP on mobile devices: Measurement and system design. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. ACM, 189--201.
[43]
Ashkan Nikravesh, David Ke Hong, Qi Alfred Chen, Harsha V Madhyastha, and Zhuoqing Morley Mao. 2016. QoE Inference Without Application Control. In Internet-QoE@ SIGCOMM. 19--24.
[44]
Ashkan Nikravesh, Hongyi Yao, Shichang Xu, David Choffnes, and Z Morley Mao. 2015. Mobilyzer: An open platform for controllable mobile network measurements. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. ACM, 389--404.
[45]
Roger Pantos and William May. 2016. HTTP live streaming. (2016).
[46]
Raimund Schatz, Tobias Hoßfeld, and Pedro Casas. 2012. Passive youtube QoE monitoring for ISPs. In Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS), 2012 Sixth International Conference on. IEEE, 358--364.
[47]
Muhammad Zubair Shafiq, Jeffrey Erman, Lusheng Ji, Alex X Liu, Jeffrey Pang, and Jia Wang. 2014. Understanding the impact of network dynamics on mobile video user engagement. In ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, Vol. 42. ACM, 367--379.
[48]
Christian Sieber, Poul Heegaard, Tobias Hoßfeld, and Wolfgang Kellerer. 2016. Sacrificing efficiency for quality of experience: YouTube's redundant traffic behavior. In IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops, 2016. IEEE, 503--511.
[49]
Matti Siekkinen, Enrico Masala, and Teemu Kämäräinen. 2016. A First Look at Quality of Mobile Live Streaming Experience: the Case of Periscope. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 477--483.
[50]
Kevin Spiteri, Rahul Urgaonkar, and Ramesh K Sitaraman. 2016. BOLA: near-optimal bitrate adaptation for online videos. In Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2016-The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 1--9.
[51]
Bolun Wang, Xinyi Zhang, Gang Wang, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y Zhao. 2016. Anatomy of a personalized livestreaming system. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, 485--498.
[52]
Xiufeng Xie, Xinyu Zhang, Swarun Kumar, and Li Erran Li. 2015. piStream: Physical layer informed adaptive video streaming over LTE. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. ACM, 413--425.
[53]
Yang Xu, Chenguang Yu, Jingjiang Li, and Yong Liu. 2012. Video telephony for end-consumers: measurement study of Google+, iChat, and Skype. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference. ACM, 371--384.
[54]
Tong Zhang, Fengyuan Ren, Wenxue Cheng, Xiaohui Luo, Ran Shu, and Xiaolan Liu. 2017. Modeling and Analyzing the Influence of Chunk Size Variation on Bitrate Adaptation in DASH. In Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2017-The 36th Annual IEEE International Conference on. IEEE.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)OASISProceedings of the 15th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference10.1145/3625468.3647610(45-55)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
  • (2023)RAV: Learning-Based Adaptive Streaming to Coordinate the Audio and Video Bitrate SelectionsIEEE Transactions on Multimedia10.1109/TMM.2022.319801325(5662-5675)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)Dissecting Latency in 360° Video Camera Sensing SystemsSensors10.3390/s2216600122:16(6001)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Dissecting VOD services for cellular: performance, root causes and best practices

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      IMC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference
      November 2017
      509 pages
      ISBN:9781450351188
      DOI:10.1145/3131365
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      In-Cooperation

      • USENIX Assoc: USENIX Assoc

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 01 November 2017

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. VOD
      2. adaptive streaming
      3. cellular
      4. video streaming

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      IMC '17
      IMC '17: Internet Measurement Conference
      November 1 - 3, 2017
      London, United Kingdom

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)14
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
      Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)OASISProceedings of the 15th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference10.1145/3625468.3647610(45-55)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
      • (2023)RAV: Learning-Based Adaptive Streaming to Coordinate the Audio and Video Bitrate SelectionsIEEE Transactions on Multimedia10.1109/TMM.2022.319801325(5662-5675)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2022)Dissecting Latency in 360° Video Camera Sensing SystemsSensors10.3390/s2216600122:16(6001)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2022
      • (2022)Understanding 5G performance for real-world servicesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544219(101-113)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
      • (2022)A Buffer-Based Adaptive Bitrate Approach in Wireless Networks With Iterative CorrectionIEEE Wireless Communications Letters10.1109/LWC.2022.317020511:8(1644-1648)Online publication date: Aug-2022
      • (2021)VibraProceedings of the 31st ACM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video10.1145/3458306.3460993(1-8)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2021
      • (2021)LivelyzerProceedings of the 12th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference10.1145/3458305.3463375(36-50)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2021
      • (2021)A variegated look at 5G in the wildProceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference10.1145/3452296.3472923(610-625)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
      • (2021)Achieving High Utilization by Elastic Chunk Scheduling in DASH SystemsJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-021-09628-230:1Online publication date: 21-Oct-2021
      • (2020)Tile Rate Allocation for 360-Degree Tiled Adaptive Video StreamingProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3394171.3413550(3724-3733)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2020
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media