PERM: Neural Adaptive Video Streaming with Multi-path Transmission

The multi-path transmission techniques enable multiple paths to maximize resource usage and increase throughput in transmission, which have been installed over mobile devices in recent years. For video streaming applications, compared to the single-path transmission, the multi-path techniques can establish multiple subflows simultaneously to extend the available bandwidth for streaming high-quality videos in mobile devices. Existing adaptive video streaming systems have difficulty in harnessing multi-path scheduling and balancing the tradeoff between the quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS) concerns. In this paper, we propose an actor-critic network based on Periodical Experience Replay for Multi-path video streaming (PERM). Specifically, PERM employs two actor modules and a critic module: the two actor modules respectively assign the path usage of each subflow and select bitrates for the next chunk of the video, while the critic module predicts the overall objectives. We conduct trace-driven emulation and real-world testbed experiment to examine the performance of PERM, and results show that PERM outperforms state-of-the-art multi-path and single path streaming systems, with an improvement of 10%-15% on the QoE and QoS metrics.