Enabling Premium Service for Streaming Video in Cellular Networks

Streaming video applications require high bandwidth for desired quality of experience (QoE), and they are driving rapid growth of mobile data traffic in cellular networks. Currently, cellular networks provide best-effort services to most user data applications. When there is congestion at the base station, streaming video applications will experience degraded QoE. In this paper, we take a cellular service provider's perspective and propose a premium service for improving QoE of streaming video applications. We design and implement a network adaptation scheme called SHADE, which allocates limited transmission resources at the base station among applications smartly, by (i) selecting a candidate bitrate for each streaming video application, and (ii) maintaining the downlink throughput at this targeted bitrate for better QoE, while still using the Non-Guaranteed Bit Rate traffic class which is suitable for high bit-rate streaming video. We demonstrate that SHADE can achieve this with high network utilization and improve QoE for streaming video applications, and with bounded negative performance impact to other applications. Our extensive experiments show that SHADE can significantly improve three key streaming video application QoE metrics simultaneously (up to 10 times improvement), compared to current practice. We discuss how cellular carriers and equipment vendors can adopt SHADE without major changes to current cellular network implementation.