The Impact of Active Queue Management on DASH-based Content Delivery

With Netflix and YouTube accounting for more than 50% of North American, fixed network peak download traffic in 2015, video streaming is a significant source of Internet traffic. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is a recent standard for live and on-demand video streaming services, where clients adapt their behaviour on-the-fly to match regularly updated estimates of network capacity. Consumer DASH streams are likely to be bottlenecked by last-mile ISP links, and impacted by emerging active queue management (AQM) schemes being deployed to counter bufferbloat. We experimentally characterise and evaluate the impact of bottlenecks utilising PIE, FQ-PIE, CoDel and FQ-CoDel AQM schemes on DASH streams. We show that PIE's higher burst tolerance provides better streaming quality for single DASH stream over moderate to high RTT paths and when coupled with a FlowQueue scheduler's flow isolation capabilities, FQ-PIE protects DASH streams in the presence of cross-traffic.