Improving Adaptive Real-Time Video Communication via Cross-Layer Optimization

Effective Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) algorithm or policy is of paramount importance for Real-Time Video Communication (RTVC) amid this pandemic to pursue uncompromised quality of experience (QoE). Existing ABR methods mainly separate the network bandwidth estimation and video encoder control, and fine-tune video bitrate towards estimated bandwidth, assuming the maximization of bandwidth utilization yields the optimal QoE. However, the QoE of an RTVC system is jointly determined by the quality of the compressed video, fluency of video playback, and interaction delay. Solely maximizing the bandwidth utilization without comprehensively considering compound impacts incurred by both transport and video application layers, does not assure a satisfactory QoE. The decoupling of the transport and application layer further exacerbates the user experience due to codec-transport incoordination. This work, therefore, proposes the Palette, a reinforcement learning-based ABR scheme that unifies the processing of transport and video application layers to directly maximize the QoE formulated as the weighted function of video quality, stalling rate, and delay. To this aim, a cross-layer optimization is proposed to derive the fine-grained compression factor of the upcoming frame(s) using cross-layer observations like network conditions, video encoding parameters, and video content complexity. As a result, Palette manages to resolve the codec-transport incoordination and to best catch up with the network fluctuation. Compared with state-of-the-art schemes in real-world tests, Palette not only reduces 3.1%-46.3% of the stalling rate, 20.2%-50.8% of the delay but also improves 0.2%-7.2% of the video quality with comparable bandwidth consumption, under a variety of application scenarios.