Integrated Optimization of Video Server Resource and Streaming Quality Over Best-Effort Network

A video streaming server needs to adapt its source/channel encoding parameters (or configurations) to changes in network conditions and to differences in users' connection profiles. The adaptation can be achieved by adjusting parameters such as frame rate, error protection ratio, and resolution. Ideally, the server should adapt the serving configurations with respect to the current network and user conditions to improve received video quality. However, adaptations that optimize playable frame rate require intensive computation, and storing all possible configurations requires a tremendous amount of storage. This brings forth the issues of how to obtain good video quality and reduce server resources usage at the same time. We address this issue in this paper. Our approach is based on the observation that transcoding between certain configurations can be performed very efficiently. We propose a framework to compute a set of configurations to store on the server by considering two opposing goals: (a) maximizing expected received quality of the video, and (b) minimizing server resource usage by lowering transcoding cost and expected number of switches between configurations. The second objective also reduces the number of configurations, and therefore reduces the total storage required. Our framework models the relationship among different configurations in a partial order, formulates the search of a good set of configurations as an energy minimization problem, and we use techniques in image segmentation to solve the problem. Experimental results show that our framework relieves the server load and increases the number of clients served, while only slightly reducing the expected frame rate.