Better video streaming when WiFi is scarce

Better video streaming when WiFi is scarce
Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In an era when the average U.S. household has five internet-connected devices, web surfers may often feel like they're always fighting over scraps of WiFi. How can a whole family all binge their favorite shows without somebody's connection slowing to a crawl?

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are working on the problem, and have developed a new system called "Minerva" that allows multiple people to stream over a single network with minimal buffering and pixelation.

The team says that the project could be a game-changer for like Netflix and Hulu that often struggle with keeping all their users happy. Beyond being useful for a single household, Minerva could also benefit people across an entire region who may all be sharing a network bottleneck.

"If five people in your house are all streaming video at once, our system can analyze how the various videos' visuals are affected by download speed," says MIT professor Mohammad Alizadeh, senior author on a related paper that will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) in Los Angeles later this month. "It then uses that information to provide each video with the best possible visual quality without degrading the experience for others."

In real-world tests Minerva reduced rebuffering time by an average of 47 percent—and, up to a third of the time, delivered an improvement in that was the equivalent to a jump in resolution from a 720p to a 1080p television.


"It has all the advantages and simplicity of TCP, while also ensuring that, if multiple videos are competing at a network link that's a bottleneck, the bandwidth will be shared fairly across streams," says Alizadeh.



"Traditional approaches try to be fair from a technological perspective, but not in terms of somebody's actual happiness or quality of experience," says Keith Winstein, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University who was not involved in the project. "What these results demonstrate is that we could all benefit if these systems and protocols were changed to adopt more of the perspective of the people watching the videos."



Nathan describes the mechanics of Minerva as an ever-evolving "push/pull" between different videos.

"This process allows the system to allocate resources to the different videos in a way that is fair to them with respect to their ," says Nathan, a at MIT CSAIL.


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More information: Vikram Nathan et al. End-to-end transport for video QoE fairness, Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication - SIGCOMM '19 (2019). DOI: 10.1145/3341302.3342077
Citation: Better video streaming when WiFi is scarce (2019, August 19) retrieved 20 January 2020 from https://techxplore.com/news/2019-08-video-streaming-wifi-scarce.html

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