CBM: Online Strategies on Cost-Aware Buffer Management for Mobile Video Streaming

Mobile video traffic, owing to the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, has been growing exponentially in recent years and started to dominate the mobile Internet. In reality, mobile video applications commonly adopt buffering techniques to handle bandwidth fluctuation and minimize the impact of stochastic wireless channels on user experiences. However, recent measurement work reveals that mobile users tend to abort more frequently than PC users during viewing videos. Such a high abortion rate results in a significant wastage of buffered video data, which is directly translated into monetary and energy cost for mobile users. In this paper, we propose an intelligent buffer management strategy called CBM (Cost-aware Buffer Management), for mobile video streaming applications. Our purpose is to minimize cost induced by un-consumed video data while respecting certain user experience requirements. To this objective, we formulate the problem into a constrained stochastic optimization problem, and apply the Lyapunov optimization theory to derive the corresponding online strategy for cost minimization. Different from conventional heuristic-based strategies, our proposed CBM strategy can provide provably performance guarantee with explicit bounds. We also conduct extensive simulations to validate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy and our experimental results show that CBM achieves significant gains over existing schemes.