Gamora: Learning-Based Buffer-Aware Preloading for Adaptive Short Video Streaming

Nowadays, the emerging short video streaming applications have gained substantial attention. With the rapidly burgeoning demand for short video streaming services, maximizing their Quality of Experience (QoE) is an onerous challenge. Current video preloading algorithms cannot determine video preloading sequence decisions appropriately due to the impact of users’ swipes and bandwidth fluctuations. As a result, it is still ambiguous how to improve the overall QoE while mitigating bandwidth wastage to optimize short video streaming services. In this article, we devise Gamora, a buffer-aware short video streaming system to provide a high QoE of users. In Gamora, we first propose an unordered preloading algorithm that utilizes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm to make video preloading decisions. Then, we further devise an Asymmetric Imitation Learning (AIL) algorithm to guide the DRL-based preloading algorithm, which enables the agent to learn from expert demonstrations for fast convergence. Finally, we implement our proposed short video streaming system prototype and evaluate the performance of Gamora on various real-world network datasets. Our results demonstrate that Gamora significantly achieves QoE improvement by 28.7%–51.4% compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, while mitigating bandwidth wastage by 40.7%–83.2% without sacrificing video quality.