QoE of YouTube Video Streaming for Current Internet Transport Protocols

Video streaming currently dominates global Internet traffic and will be of even increasing importance in the future. In this paper we assess the impact of the underlying transport protocol on the user perceived quality for video streaming using YouTube as example. In particular, we investigate whether UDP or TCP fits better for Video-on-Demand delivery from the end user's perspective, when the video is transmitted over a bottleneck link. For UDP based streaming, the bottleneck link results in spatial and temporal video artifacts, decreasing the video quality. In contrast, in the case of TCP based streaming, the displayed content itself is not disturbed but playback suffers from stalling due to rebuffering. The results of subjective user studies for both scenarios are analyzed in order to assess the transport protocol influences on Quality of Experience of YouTube. To this end, application-level measurements are conducted for YouTube streaming over a network bottleneck in order to develop models for realistic stalling patterns. Furthermore, mapping functions are derived that accurately describe the relationship between network-level impairments and QoE for both protocols.