Mobile edge computing-enabled channel-aware video streaming for 4G LTE

Ever increasing numbers of users are surfing the net via an LTE access network. It has been predicted that three quarters (75%) of the world's mobile data traffic will be video-based by 2020. As the video space grows, media companies have been using adaptive bitrate technology for many years. The MPEG-DASH is the widely used HTTP-based adaptive streaming solution based on TCP. To address the bandwidth utilization issue, in this paper we investigate the ETSI Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Intelligent Video Acceleration Service mechanism to improve video transmission over 4G LTE. Specifically, with the radio information provided by the MEC server, the video server can adaptively transmit just one copy of suitable bitrate data based on the throughput. We use OpenAirInterface (OAI), a 4G compliance emulator, as our testbed to implement and verify our proposed MEC-based adaptive video transmission mechanism. We design and implement a “filter” module in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer over the OAI platform, which can reference Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) as a parameter to decide which bitrate type of data should be passed to the MAC Packet Scheduler for real resource allocation. By using constant-bitrate as our control groups, the testbed indicates that, consistent with our expectations, our mechanism can significantly benefit from lower latency with a reasonable throughput.