Using packet trimming at the edge for in-network video quality adaption

Abstract This paper describes the effects of running in-network quality adaption by trimming the packets of layered video streams at the edge. The video stream is transmitted using the BPP transport protocol, which is like UDP, but has been designed to be both amenable to trimming and to provide low-latency and high reliability. The traffic adaption uses the Packet Wash process of Big Packet Protocol (BPP) on the transmitted Scalable Video Coding (SVC) video streams as they pass through a network function which is BPP-aware and embedded at the edge. Our previous work has either demonstrated the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers to implement Packet Wash directly, or the use of a network function in the core of the network to do the same task. This paper presents our effort to deploy and evaluate such a process at the edge, highlighting the packet trimming algorithm and showing the packet trimming effects on the streams. We compare the performance of transmitting video using BPP and the Packet Wash trimming, against alternative transmission schemes, namely UDP and HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS), presenting a number of quality parameters. The results demonstrate that providing traffic engineering using in-network quality adaption using packet trimming, provides high quality at the receiver.