Enhancing User Experience for Multi-Screen Social TV Streaming over Wireless Networks
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing social interaction and video quality for users of multi-screen social TV systems, representing an incremental improvement in resource allocation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing user experience in multi-screen social TV streaming over wireless networks by proposing a cloud-based playback rate allocation scheme that maximizes video quality of experience while bounding inter-user delay, achieving near-optimal tradeoffs and resilient performance under fast channel fading.
Recently, multi-screen cloud social TV is invented to transform TV into social experience. People watching the same content on social TV may come from different locations, while freely interact with each other through text, image, audio and video. This crucial virtual living-room experience adds social aspects into existing performance metrics. In this paper, we parse social TV user experience into three elements (i.e., inter-user delay, video quality of experience (QoE), and resource efficiency), and provide a joint analytical framework to enhance user experience. Specifically, we propose a cloud-based optimal playback rate allocation scheme to maximize the overall QoE while upper bounding inter-user delay. Experiment results show that our algorithm achieves near-optimal tradeoff between inter-user delay and video quality, and demonstrates resilient performance even under very fast wireless channel fading.