Maria G. Martini

Nabajeet Barman, Maria G Martini

Gaming video streaming services have grown tremendously in the past few years, with higher resolutions, higher frame rates and HDR gaming videos getting increasingly adopted among the gaming community. Since gaming content as such is different from non-gaming content, it is imperative to evaluate the performance of the existing encoders to help understand the bandwidth requirements of such services, as well as further improve the compression efficiency of such encoders. Towards this end, we present in this paper GamingHDRVideoSET, a dataset consisting of eighteen 10-bit UHD-HDR gaming videos and encoded video sequences using four different codecs, together with their objective evaluation results. The dataset is available online at [to be added after paper acceptance]. Additionally, the paper discusses the codec compression efficiency of most widely used practical encoders, i.e., x264 (H.264/AVC), x265 (H.265/HEVC) and libvpx (VP9), as well the recently proposed encoder libaom (AV1), on 10-bit, UHD-HDR content gaming content. Our results show that the latest compression standard AV1 results in the best compression efficiency, followed by HEVC, H.264, and VP9.

Alcardo Alex Barakabitze, Nabajeet Barman, Arslan Ahmad et al.

We provide in this paper a tutorial and a comprehensive survey of QoE management solutions in current and future networks. We start with a high level description of QoE management for multimedia services, which integrates QoE modelling, monitoring, and optimization. This followed by a discussion of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) solutions as the dominant technique for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet. We then summarize the key elements in SDN/NFV along with an overview of ongoing research projects, standardization activities and use cases related to SDN, NFV, and other emerging applications. We provide a survey of the state-of-the-art of QoE management techniques categorized into three different groups: a) QoE-aware/driven strategies using SDN and/or NFV; b) QoE-aware/driven approaches for adaptive streaming over emerging architectures such as multi-access edge computing, cloud/fog computing, and information-centric networking; and c) extended QoE management approaches in new domains such as immersive augmented and virtual reality, mulsemedia and video gaming applications. Based on the review, we present a list of identified future QoE management challenges regarding emerging multimedia applications, network management and orchestration, network slicing and collaborative service management in softwarized networks. Finally, we provide a discussion on future research directions with a focus on emerging research areas in QoE management, such as QoE-oriented business models, QoE-based big data strategies, and scalability issues in QoE optimization.