QoE-Fairness-Aware Bandwidth Allocation Design for MEC-Assisted ABR Video Transmission

Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming provides an effective way to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video users and is now the de facto standard for video delivery. Meanwhile, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been applied to assist ABR streaming, improving the performance of mobile networks and enabling efficient video delivery. However, smooth ABR streaming relies on the bidirectional adaptation between bitrate selection and bandwidth allocation, as they operate on distinct timescales and have different optimization goals. Moreover, since the constrained wireless resources available within a cell are shared by multiple users, their QoE should be optimized not only jointly but fairly. To this end, we propose a QoE-fairness-aware bandwidth allocation (QFA-BA) method for MEC-assisted ABR video transmission. With a novel perspective on buffer occupancy modeling, the relationship between bitrate selection and bandwidth allocation is studied. An enhanced QoE evaluation model is then proposed to correlate bitrate selection with bandwidth allocation and facilitate QFA-BA. Finally, a soft actor-critic (SAC) framework improving both the QoE and QoE-fairness is presented for QFA-BA. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our QFA-BA can perceive fine-grained buffer occupancy and stabilize it near a preset value with relatively more and larger bitrate switchings, exhibiting smoother convergence, better QoE (50.29%) and QoE fairness (54.81%).