Forecasting Video QoE With Deep Learning From Multivariate Time-Series

The end users’ satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) is a fundamental criterion for networked video service providers such as video-on-demand providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.), cloud gaming providers (Google Stadia, PlayStation Now, etc.) and videoconferencing providers (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.). To know the QoE, providers today typically predict it from the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters or the client-side's actual QoE metrics measured at the current time-step. But the former does not precisely reflect the users' experience, and the latter has a delay between QoE measurements at the client-side and the user's current experience. Mitigating this delay can provide a noticeable improvement in the delivery system's performance. For example, accurate forecasting of QoE for the near future allows the service management system to take a proactive approach and fix delivery issues before they become a noticeable problem at the end user, or at least reduce overall QoE degradation. QoE forecasting can also be used in rate adaptation in DASH or resource allocation in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a method to prognosticate QoE metrics. Using data collected from an industry video streaming testbed for three different classes, we define a multivariate time series forecasting problem. We then model a hybrid state-of-the-art deep learning method, BiLSTM-CNN, to forecast the QoE metrics in advance. Evaluation of our proposed method compared to four other well-known ML models of Support Vector Regression (SVR), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long short-term memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method.