effects of internet path selection on video-qoe
This paper presents large scale Internet measurements to understand and improve the effects of Internet path selection on perceived video quality. We systematically study a large number of Internet paths between popular video destinations and clients to create an empirical understanding of location, persistence and recurrence of failures. We map these failures to perceptual quality by reconstructing video clips obtained from the trace to quantify both the perceptual degradations from these failures as well as the fraction of such failures that can be recovered. We then investigate ways to recover from QoE degradation by choosing one-hop detour paths that preserve application specific policies. We seek simple, scalable path selection strategies without the need for background path monitoring or apriori path knowledge of any kind. To do this, we deployed five measurement overlays: one each in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and two spread across the globe. We used these to stream IP-traces of a variety of clips between source-destination pairs while probing alternate paths for an entire week. Our results indicate that a source can recover from upto 90\% of the degradations by attempting to restore QoE with any five randomly chosen nodes in an overlay. We argue that our results are robust across datasets. Finally, we design and implement a prototype packet forwarding module called source initiated frame restoration (SIFR). We deployed SIFR on PlanetLab nodes, and compared the performance of SIFR with the default Internet routing. We show that SIFR outperforms IP-path selection by providing higher on-screen perceptual quality.
internet multimedia quality of experience