A paper with the title “A Scalable User Fairness Model for Adaptive Video Streaming over Future Internet” is under recommended revision for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC) Special Issue on “Video Distribution in the Future Internet” (Publication date: Second Quarter 2016). 

Abstract:

The growing demand for online distribution of high quality and high throughput content is dominating today’s Internet infrastructure. This includes both production and user-generated media. Among the myriad of media distribution mechanisms, HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is becoming a popular choice for multi-screen and multi-bitrate media services over heterogeneous networks. HAS applications often compete for network resources without any coordination between each other. This leads to quality-of-experience (QoE) fluctuations on delivered content, and unfairness between end users. Meanwhile, new network protocols, technologies and architectures, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), are being developed for the future Internet. The programmability, flexibility and openness of these emerging developments can greatly assist the distribution of video over the Internet. This is driven by the increasing consumer demands and QoE requirements. This paper introduces a novel user-level fairness model UFair and its hierarchical variant UFairHA , which orchestrate HAS media streams using emerging network architectures and incorporate three fairness metrics (video quality, switching impact and cost efficiency) to achieve user-level fairness in video distribution. The UFairHA has also been implemented in a purpose-built SDN testbed using open technologies such as OpenFlow. Experimental results demonstrate the performance and feasibility of our design for video distribution over future Internet.

Keywords: Hierarchical resource allocation, adaptive media streaming, QoE utility fairness, network orchestration, software defined networking, human factor