Post-Streaming Wastage Analysis A Data Wastage Aware Framework in Mobile Video Streaming

Mobile video streaming is now ubiquitous among mobile users. This work investigates a less studied and yet haunting problem in mobile streaming data wastage, that the downloaded video data cannot be played back and is discarded by video players due to user viewing behaviors, e.g., early departure, and thus the bandwidth consumed in transferring them is wasted. Empirical measurements show that data wastage is significant, e.g., around 20% of video data downloaded were in fact wasted. Moreover, substantial data wastage exists not only in current commercial streaming platforms, but also in state-of-the-art adaptive streaming systems proposed in the literature. This work develops a new Post-Streaming Wastage Analysis (PSWA) framework to tackle this problem by converting existing streaming algorithms into data wastage aware. PSWA enables the service provider to explicitly control the tradeoff between data wastage and quality-of-experience (QoE). Extensive evaluations show that PSWA can reduce data wastage significantly (e.g., over 80%) with few or even no negative impacts on QoE. Moreover, it has strong robustness to perform consistently across a wide range of networks. PSWA can be readily implemented into existing or future streaming platforms, and offers a practical solution to data wastage for mobile streaming services.