Post-Streaming Wastage Analysis - A Data Wastage Aware Framework in Mobile Video Streaming

Mobile video streaming is now ubiquitous among mobile users. This work investigates a less studied and yet significant problem in mobile video streaming - data wastage, i.e., some downloaded video data may not be played back but discarded by video players due to early departure or video skip, thus the bandwidth consumed in transferring them is wasted. Our measurements show that data wastage is significant in practice, e.g., 25.2 percent similar to 51.7 percent of video data downloaded are in fact wasted. Moreover, substantial data wastage exists not only in current commercial streaming platforms, but also in state-of-the-art adaptive streaming systems proposed in the literature. This work develops a new post-streaming wastage analysis (PSWA) framework to tackle this problem by converting existing adaptive streaming algorithms into data wastage aware versions. PSWA enables the streaming vendors to explicitly control the tradeoff between data wastage and quality-of-experience (QoE). Extensive evaluations show that PSWA can reduce data wastage significantly (e.g., 80 percent) without any adverse impact on QoE. Moreover, it has strong robustness to perform consistently across a wide range of networks. PSWA can be readily implemented into current streaming platforms, and thus offers a practical solution to data wastage for mobile streaming services.

Automated summary

This work investigates the issue of data wastage in mobile video streaming, where downloaded video data that is not played back is discarded, resulting in wasted bandwidth. The study shows significant data wastage in practice and proposes a new framework called PSWA to tackle this problem. PSWA can reduce data wastage by 80% without impacting user experience and is robust across different network environments.