skip to main content
10.1145/3555050.3569120acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesconextConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Coal not diamonds: how memory pressure falters mobile video QoE

Published: 30 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The popularity of video streaming on smartphones has led to rising demands for high-quality mobile video streaming. Consequently, we are observing growing support for higher resolution videos (e.g., HD, FHD, QHD) and higher video frame rates (e.g., 48 FPS, 60 FPS). However, supporting high-quality video streaming on smartphones introduces new challenges---besides the available network capacity, the smartphone itself can become a bottleneck due to resource constraints, such as low available memory. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation of memory usage on smartphones and its impacts on mobile video streaming. Our investigation - driven by a combination of a user study, user survey, and experiments on real smartphones - reveals that (i) most smartphones observe memory pressure (i.e., low available memory scenarios), (ii) memory pressure can have a significant impact on mobile video QoE when streaming high-quality videos, e.g., resulting in the mean frame drop rate of 9--100% across smartphones and significantly lower user ratings, and (iii) the drop in mobile video QoE happens primarily due to the way in which video processes interact with kernel-level memory management mechanism, with opportunities for improving mobile video QoE through better adaptation by video clients.

References

[1]
Akamai. 2016. dash.js. https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js/.
[2]
Android: Low RAM Configuration. https://source.android.com/devices/tech/perf/low-ram.
[3]
Bali in 8k ULTRA HD HDR - Paradise of Asia (60 FPS). https://youtu.be/fajeL728XG8.
[4]
Clarissa Ward presses Taliban fighter on treatment of women. https://youtu.be/RIw7smlkIaU.
[5]
ComponentCallbacks2,. https://tinyurl.com/97kc9pu5.
[6]
Devices used to watch online video worldwide as of August 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/784351/online-video-devices/.
[7]
Distribution of worldwide YouTube viewing time as of 2nd quarter 2021, by device. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1173543/youtube-viewing-time-share-device/.
[8]
Dubai Flow Motion in 4K - A Rob Whitworth Film. https://youtu.be/BLL-kW_TpT4.
[9]
Dumpsys. https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/dumpsys.
[10]
ExoPlayer. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/exoplayer.
[11]
ExoPlayer: Flexible media playback for Android (Google I/O '17). https://youtu.be/jAZn-J1I8Eg.
[12]
Logcat command-line tool. https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/logcat.
[13]
Memory allocation among processes. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/memory-management.
[14]
Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide.
[15]
NIGMA vs OG - TI CHAMPIONS GAME - DPC EU DREAMLEAGUE S14 DOTA 2. https://youtu.be/Ek-gfQo6ryE.
[16]
Novak Djokovic vs Denis Shapovalov (4K 60FPS) MATCH HIGHLIGHTS Court Level View 2021 ATP CUP. https://youtu.be/lnoba3DZQZw.
[17]
Overview of memory management. https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/memory-overview.
[18]
Package visibility filtering on Android. https://developer.android.com/training/package-visibility.
[19]
Perfetto. https://perfetto.dev/.
[20]
Recommended YouTube Upload Encode Settings. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate.
[21]
Supported media formats. https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/mediaformats.
[22]
Understanding Android Memory Usage (Google 1/O'18). https://tinyurl.com/33yk98s7.
[23]
Z. Akhtar, Y. Li, R. Govindan, E. Halepovic, S. Hao, Y. Liu, and S. Sen. Avic: A cache for adaptive bitrate video. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies, CoNEXT '19, page 305--317, New York, NY, USA, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery.
[24]
Z. Akhtar, Y. S. Nam, R. Govindan, S. Rao, J. Chen, E. Katz-Bassett, B. Ribeiro, J. Zhan, and H. Zhang. Oboe: Auto-tuning video abr algorithms to network conditions. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM '18, page 44--58, New York, NY, USA, 2018. Association for Computing Machinery.
[25]
M. Dasari, S. Vargas, A. Bhattacharya, A. Balasubramanian, S. R. Das, and M. Ferdman. Impact of device performance on mobile internet qoe. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018, IMC '18, pages 1--7, New York, NY, USA, 2018. ACM.
[26]
M. Ghasemi, P. Kanuparthy, A. Mansy, T. Benson, and J. Rexford. Performance characterization of a commercial video streaming service. In Proceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference, IMC '16, 2016.
[27]
T.-Y. Huang, R. Johari, N. McKeown, M. Trunnell, and M. Watson. A buffer-based approach to rate adaptation: Evidence from a large video streaming service. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on SIGCOMM, SIGCOMM '14, 2014.
[28]
A. V. Katsenou, J. Sole, and D. R. Bull. Content-gnostic bitrate ladder prediction for adaptive video streaming. In 2019 Picture Coding Symposium (PCS), 2019.
[29]
A. V. Katsenou, J. Sole, and D. R. Bull. Efficient bitrate ladder construction for content-optimized adaptive video streaming. 2021.
[30]
Y. Liang, J. Li, R. Ausavarungnirun, R. Pan, L. Shi, T.-W. Kuo, and C. J. Xue. Acclaim: Adaptive memory reclaim to improve user experience in android systems. In 2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 20), pages 897--910. USENIX Association, July 2020.
[31]
Y. Liang, Q. Li, and C. J. Xue. Mismatched memory management of android smartphones. In 11th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage 19), Renton, WA, July 2019. USENIX Association.
[32]
H. Mao, R. Netravali, and M. Alizadeh. Neural adaptive video streaming with pensieve. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM '17, 2017.
[33]
U. Naseer, T. A. Benson, and R. Netravali. Webmedic: Disentangling the memory-functionality tension for the next billion mobile web users. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, HotMobile '21, page 71--77, New York, NY, USA, 2021. Association for Computing Machinery.
[34]
I. A. Qazi, Z. A. Qazi, T. A. Benson, G. Murtaza, E. Latif, A. Manan, and A. Tariq. Mobile web browsing under memory pressure. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 50(4):35--48, Oct. 2020.
[35]
K. Spiteri, R. Urgaonkar, and R. K. Sitaraman. Bola: Near-optimal bitrate adaptation for online videos. In IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 2016.
[36]
Y. Sun, X. Yin, J. Jiang, V. Sekar, F. Lin, N. Wang, T. Liu, and B. Sinopoli. Cs2p: Improving video bitrate selection and adaptation with data-driven throughput prediction. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, SIGCOMM '16, pages 272--285, New York, NY, USA, 2016. ACM.
[37]
X. Yin, A. Jindal, V. Sekar, and B. Sinopoli. A control-theoretic approach for dynamic adaptive video streaming over http. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM '15, 2015.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CoNEXT '22: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
November 2022
431 pages
ISBN:9781450395083
DOI:10.1145/3555050
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 November 2022

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Badges

Author Tags

  1. memory pressure
  2. mobile video streaming
  3. smartphones

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CoNEXT '22
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

CoNEXT '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 151 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)80
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 26 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media