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XLINK: QoE-driven multi-path QUIC transport in large-scale video services

Published: 09 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

We report XLINK, a multi-path QUIC video transport solution with experiments in Taobao short videos. XLINK is designed to meet two operational challenges at the same time: (1) Optimized user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) in terms of robustness, smoothness, responsiveness, and mobility and (2) Minimized cost overhead for service providers (typically CDNs). The core of XLINK is to take the opportunity of QUIC as a user-space protocol and directly capture user-perceived video QoE intent to control multi-path scheduling and management. We overcome major hurdles such as multi-path head-of-line blocking, network heterogeneity, and rapid link variations and balance cost and performance.
To the best of our knowledge, XLINK is the first large-scale experimental study of multi-path QUIC video services in production environments. We present the results of over 3 million e-commerce product short-video plays from consumers who upgraded to Taobao android app with XLINK. Our study shows that compared to single-path QUIC, XLINK achieved 19 to 50% improvement in the 99-th percentile video-chunk request completion time, 32% improvement in the 99-th percentile first-video-frame latency, 23 to 67% improvement in the re-buffering rate at the expense of 2.1% redundant traffic.

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XLINK: QoE-Driven Multi-Path QUIC Transport in Large-scale Video Services: Public Review
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
      August 2021
      868 pages
      ISBN:9781450383837
      DOI:10.1145/3452296
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      Published: 09 August 2021

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      Author Tags

      1. QUIC
      2. QoE
      3. multi-path
      4. scheduling
      5. video
      6. wireless transport

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      • Research-article

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      • Natural Science Foundation of China
      • Beijing Natural Science Foundation

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      SIGCOMM '21: ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
      August 23 - 27, 2021
      Virtual Event, USA

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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      • (2024)QDSRProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692036(715-730)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
      • (2024)ETCProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692008(265-284)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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