Mobile DASH services using NFV in small cell networks is considered an approach for future multimedia services that request for high QoE standards. MoDASH offers a QoE orchestration solution for DASH streaming services over the SDN enabled FLAME platform. Our methodology includes a data offloading mechanism, which offloads video content to the EDGE server.
Our technique dynamically adapts the offloading scheme according to the video types requested by the users. To this end the available video types are separated into three use cases as described below:
- Regular use case in which regular high resolution videos are considered. The users may watch such content with mobile phones; Laptops or tablets while they are stationary inside the coverage are of the FLAME Wi-Fi.
- Mobility use case in which regular high and medium resolution videos are considered. This use case addresses the user mobility, and thus the users move around and change AP coverage while watching the video content.
- Interactivity use case in which high resolution and high bit rate videos are considered. Interactive content is considered very demanding in terms of storage requirements, and thus we adapt our data offloading strategy accordingly when the users request such content.
MoDASH solution also employs a computation offloading mechanism capable of balancing the network’s computation load and migrate core services closer to the end user. Under the premise the streaming service is deployed in a distributed way to the EDGE server when the user traffic surpasses a certain threshold.
Experiment day
We carried out trial demo on 3rd December, a not that sunny day. The experiments were conducted along the Perre IV street in the Sant Marti area in Barcelona. During the first hour, 2 users were testing individual regular, mobility and interactivity use cases. During the last hour, 4 users participated in testing all use cases simultaneously. More specific, 2 users run the mobility use case, 1 user run the regular use case and 1 user run the interactivity use case.
In order to validate the efficiency of the MoDASH solution we measured KPIs that reflect on the QoE perceived by the users as well as on the network resource availability. Such KPIs include the network latency, service response time, service availability, initial play out delay, network bandwidth and the utilization of CPU, RAM and Disk resources. KPI analysis shows an average latency of 1.8 seconds, initial play out delays lower the 0.3 seconds and 90% service availability. Additionally due to the lightweight nature of the MoDASH solution, no high RAM or CPU utilization rates were observed. MoDASH also achieves seamless content delivery to the end-user as the video buffers were constantly full and no video stalls were detected even on videos with high resolution. We conclude that the QoE orchestration methodology we propose is successfully validated and the QoE provisioning technique achieves high performance when deployed over the FLAME platform.
MoDASH was a good chance for both Cogninn and FLAME partners in Barcelona to realize the capabilities of the NFV enabled FLAME platform for future virtualization technologies providing next generation media.
Blog post by Fotis Foukalas from Cogninn