Open Networking Summit Europe 2018

Mobile devices download video clips by sharing the network path from a cloud-hosted ingress node of video content delivery networks (CDN). Virtualized network functions (VNF) realize AIMD-based video rate control algorithm to handle congestion along the path. AIMD is exercised on the aggregated data flows at a source ingress node based on the ’loss reports’ signaled from the receiver egress node. An aggregated control reduces the signaling overhead, relative to the existing methods that anchor an AIMD instance on each user device itself (e.g., DASH). Besides scalability, it also improves the user-perceived quality: low rate jitter and isolation against device faults. We offload aggregated AIMD-based control to the in-network overlay nodes serving as VNFs for video content caching & rendering. The ’last-mile’ bandwidth control is done by fine-granular video encoders in the devices.