The increasing demand for online high-quality video streaming has brought huge challenges to the traditional client-server video streaming systems due to the high feedback delay, rigorous bandwidth requirement, and the lack of a mechanism of centralized resource management between users. In this work, we propose AMIS-MU, an edge computing-based mobile video streaming system that optimizes the watching experience of users via playback adaptation and channel resource allocation. AMIS-MU fully explores the power of edge servers from three perspectives. First, by pre-caching videos from the cloud, AMIS-MU analyzes video contents at the edge, and achieves a nearly imperceptible content-based playback speed adaptation. Second, as the edge server controls the channel resources of users in a centralized fashion, AMIS-MU adaptively updates the channel configuration to optimize the overall watching experience. Last, the plenty of computational power available at the edge enables a more intelligent playback control by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We propose a novel usage of DRL which significantly reduces the complexity of the cross-layer joint optimization problem and solve the non-convex channel resource allocation problem by Lyapunov optimization. Experiments show that AMIS-MU outperforms other existing algorithms in terms of average QoE and fairness.

This work proposes AMIS, an edge computing-based adaptive video streaming system. AMIS explores the power of edge computing in three aspects. First, with video contents pre-cached in the local buffer, AMIS is content-aware which adapts the video playout strategy based on the scene features of video contents and quality of experience (QoE) of users. Second, AMIS is channel-aware which measures the channel conditions in real-time and estimates the wireless bandwidth. Third, by integrating the content features and channel estimation, AMIS applies the deep reinforcement learning model to optimize the playout strategy towards the best QoE. Therefore, AMIS is an intelligent content- and channel-aware scheme which fully explores the intelligence of edge computing and adapts to general environments and QoE requirements. Using trace-driven simulations, we show that AMIS can succeed in improving the average QoE by 14%-46% as compared to the state-of-the-art adaptive bitrate algorithms.