QFlow: A Learning Approach to High QoE Video Streaming at the Wireless Edge

Abstract

The predominant use of wireless access networks is for media streaming applications, but current networks treat all packets the same and can’t determine which clients need service most urgently; with widespread software reconfigurability in networking devices, agile control policies can now be applied in access networks, requiring a system design that enables configuration, measures application performance impact (Quality of Experience), and adaptively selects new configurations, essentially a Markov Decision Process with unknown parameters; the goal is to develop QFlow, a platform to instantiate this loop and various control policies, using video streaming over YouTube as a use case, focusing on priority queueing and determining client assignments per queue each decision period; policies are developed using both model-based and model-free reinforcement learning, an auction-based system for priority service bidding, and a structured index-based policy, with experiments showing these policies on QFlow select the right clients for prioritization in high-load scenarios, outperforming known solutions with over 25% improvement in QoE and achieving a perfect QoE score of 5 over 85% of the time.