Adaptive video streaming testbed design for performance study and assessment of QoE

Hypertext Transfer Protocol adaptive streaming switches between different video qualities, adapting to the network conditions, and avoids stalling streamed frames over high‐oscillation client's throughput improving the users' quality of experience (QoE). Quality of experience has become the most important parameter to lead the service providers to know about the end‐user feedback. Implementing Hypertext Transfer Protocol adaptive streaming applications to find out QoE in real‐life scenarios of vast networks becomes more challenging and complex task regarding to cost, agile, time, and decisions. In this paper, a virtualized network testbed to virtualize various machines to support implementing experiments of adaptive video streaming has been developed. Within the test study, the metrics which demonstrate performance of QoE are investigated, respectively, including initial delay (ie, startup delay at the beginning of playback a video), frequency switches (ie, number of times the quality is changed), accumulative video time (ie, number and length of stalls), CPU usage, and battery energy consumption. Furthermore, the relation between effective parameters of QoS on the aforementioned metrics for different segment length is investigated. Experimental results show that the proposed virtualized system is agile, easy to install and use, and costs less than real testbeds. Moreover, the subjective and objective performance studies of QoE evaluation in the system have proven that the segment lengths of 6 to 8 seconds were faired and more efficient than others according to the investigated parameters.