Content Harvest Network: Optimizing First Mile for Crowdsourced Live Streaming

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology 2019-07, Vol.29 (7), p.2112-2125
• Main Authors: Pang, Haitian, Wang, Zhi, Yan, Chen, Ding, Qinghua, Yi, Kun, Liu, Jiangchuan, Sun, Lifeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidth; broadcaster uploading; content harvest network; Crowdsourced live streaming; Crowdsourcing; Electronic devices; Multimedia; Operations research; Optimization; Real-time systems; Relays; Servers; Streaming media; Sun; User generated content; Video broadcasting; Video transmission
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2862619

Crowdsourced live streaming (CLS), such as Twitch.tv and Inke.tv, has emerged as an important multimedia application in recent years. Video delivery in such CLS service involves two steps: 1) video uploading-video streaming (i.e., a live channel) generated from a broadcaster is uploaded to the server, which we call the "first mile" network and 2) video distribution-the video streaming is then delivered to viewers in the channel. Today's CLS services usually use conventional content delivery network solutions to address the video distribution problem, while little attention has been paid to improve the video uploading quality. Our measurement study shows that the first mile network causes 17% viewer rebuffers, and some viewers quit the channel once encountering rebuffer. In this paper, we propose a content harvest network (CHN) architecture to address the uploading problem in the CLS service. Specifically, the CHN architecture employs edge devices in the network as relays to receive the streaming uploaded by broadcasters and then forward to the central servers. On one hand, we need to reduce the latency since it is live streaming; on the other hand, we must provide sustainable upload bandwidth. It is challenging to achieve both at the same time, especially in such high dynamic system as CLS. In order to provide global optimal and real-time assignment, we propose a hybrid solution, i.e., centralized and distributed assignment. Specifically, we formulate the centralized relay assignment problem as an optimization problem to achieve both low latency and sustainable bandwidth. To cope with the frequent channel establishments, we use a multi-armed bandit method to characterize the time-variant network condition. Experiment results on a large-scale trace provided by Inke.tv show that our solution can reduce the overall viewer cost by 40% compared to state-of-the-art solutions. The viewers' rebuffer can also be reduced by 50%.