English

CANE: A Cascade-Control Approach for Network-Assisted Video QoE Management

Optimization and Control 2023-01-16 v1 Networking and Internet Architecture Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Prior efforts have shown that network-assisted schemes can improve the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and QoE fairness when multiple video players compete for bandwidth. However, realizing network-assisted schemes in practice is challenging, as: i) the network has limited visibility into the client players' internal state and actions; ii) players' actions may nullify or negate the network's actions; and iii) the players' objectives might be conflicting. To address these challenges, we formulate network-assisted QoE optimization through a cascade control abstraction. This informs the design of CANE, a practical network-assisted QoE framework. CANE uses machine learning techniques to approximate each player's behavior as a black-box model and model predictive control to achieve a near-optimal solution. We evaluate CANE through realistic simulations and show that CANE improves multiplayer QoE fairness by ~50% compared to pure client-side adaptive bitrate algorithms and by ~20% compared to uniform traffic shaping.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.05688,
  title  = {CANE: A Cascade-Control Approach for Network-Assisted Video QoE Management},
  author = {Mehdi Hosseinzadeh and Karthick Shankar and Maria Apostolaki and Jay Ramachandran and Steven Adams and Vyas Sekar and Bruno Sinopoli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.05688},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:11:21.655Z