A Survey on Intelligent Solutions for Increased Video Delivery Quality in Cloud–Edge–End Networks

Abstract

The digital age has brought a significant increase in video traffic. This traffic growth, driven by rapid Internet advancements and a surge in multimedia applications, presents both challenges and opportunities to video transmissions. Users seek high-quality video content, prompting service providers to offer high-definition options to improve user experience and increase profits. However, traditional end-to-end best-effort networks struggle to meet the demands of extensive video streaming and ensure good user Quality of Experience (QoE), especially in high user mobility scenarios or fluctuating network conditions. Addressing some of these challenges, content delivery networks (CDN) are instrumental in delivering video content, but they are under increased pressure to support high quality and reduce their deployment and maintenance costs. Currently, cloud-edge-end fusion technologies have become one of the optimization directions for network services due to their flexibility and scalability. At the same time, in the context of the recent advancements in computing-focused network paradigms, intelligent enhancement techniques (e.g., super-resolution), commonly utilized in image optimization, have been adopted as a pivotal solution for increasing video delivery quality. To illustrate the essence and employment of the intelligent enhancement solutions for video streaming, this paper first outlines the video streaming process, discusses relevant evaluation metrics, and examines aspects related to the intelligent solutions. Then the paper presents the intelligent enhancement process of video streaming, analyzes various typical intelligent models for content enhancement and highlights their distinct characteristics. This exploration delves deeper into various intelligent quality-improved solutions, scrutinizing their applicability across different transmission scenarios like Video on Demand (VoD) and live streaming, and shedding light on their strengths and weaknesses from a cloud-edge-end fusion perspective. Additionally, the intelligent quality-enhanced video delivery systems are analysed comprehensively, exploring their impact on network traffic, computational demand, and storage needs, and aligning them with potential deployment scenarios and use cases. Finally, the article identifies open issues and key challenges that warrant attention in future research endeavors.