QoE-Optimized MultiPath Scheduling for Video Services in Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer CDNs

Video content providers such as Douyin implement Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Networks (PCDNs) to reduce the costs associated with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) while still maintaining optimal user-perceived quality of experience (QoE). PCDNs rely on the remaining resources of edge devices, such as edge access devices and hosts, to store and distribute data with a Multiple-Server-to-One-Client (MS2OC) communication pattern. MS2OC parallel transmission pattern suffers from severe data out-of-order issues. PCDNs offer significant cost savings by using multiple low-cost edge devices. However, due to its unique characteristics, including pull-based streaming transmission, many heterogeneous paths, and large receiving buffers, directly applying existing schedulers designed for Multipath TCP (MPTCP) to PCDN fails to meet the two goals of high aggregate bandwidth and low end-to-end delivery latency. To tackle this issue, we provide a detailed overview of Douyin’s self-developed PCDN video transmission system and introduce the first QoE-enhanced packet-level scheduler for PCDN systems, named Pscheduler. Pscheduler evaluates path quality with a congestion-control-decoupled algorithm and employs our proposed path-pick-packet method for data distribution, ensuring a smooth video playback experience. Additionally, we propose a redundant transmission algorithm to enhance task download speeds for segmented video transmission. Our extensive online A/B tests, involving 100,000 Douyin users generating tens of millions of video data points, demonstrate that Pscheduler achieves an average improvement of 60% in goodput, a 20% reduction in data delivery waiting time, and a 30% reduction in rebuffering rates. Furthermore, we conducted simulation experiments that further validate the effectiveness of Pscheduler, confirming its improvements in performance metrics under various network conditions.