Research projects

Nestor: Quality-of-Experience of adaptive video streaming in mobile broadband networks

Funding:

EU Horizon 2020

Homepage:

https://www.monroe-project.eu/firstopencall/

The wide deployment of multimedia services over packet networks has highlighted that the original design of the Internet as a best-effort network makes it problematic for bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive applications, like video streaming. Additionally, network operators typically employ centralized delivery architectures that lead to long paths between end-users and content servers, waste of network resources and increased delays. This issue becomes more important in mobile broadband networks, which have stringent resource limitations and fast- changing conditions.
The NESTOR project aims at conducting an experiment campaign based on the MONROE platform to evaluate the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) of popular video streaming services (e.g. YouTube and Netflix) with active and passive measurements. Special emphasis will be given to adaptive video streaming (especially MPEG-DASH) which enables the seamless adaptation of the video client to the specific network conditions of each user and is more relevant to mobile broadband networks. The understanding of the impact of the network parameters and the media content on the human perception are key factors in optimizing the end-to-end delivery chain. More importantly, the NESTOR project will help create a sustainable experimental platform which will be able to be used after the end of the measurement campaign by third-parties (e.g., operators, video platforms, and network engineers) to test and evaluate the performance of adaptive video streaming services in a seamless, intuitive and unobtrusive manner. Thus, the experiments will assist in benchmarking mobile broadband operators in terms of reliability and in the identification of key performance indicators that could be used to improve their networks.