Choir: Tackling RTBC Performance Impossible Triangle with 5G Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces Choir, a collaborative 5G-based rate control solution designed to meet the demanding performance triangle of RTBC applications like cloud VR and 8K streaming.

Contribution

Choir uniquely integrates 5G radio features with video traffic patterns to improve rate control, addressing limitations of existing solutions.

Findings

Achieves high average bitrate in simulations and testbeds.

Reduces tail delay below 50 ms across scenarios.

Ensures fairness among multiple users.

Abstract

Real-time broadband communication (RTBC) scenarios, such as cloud virtual reality and 8K live streaming, further raise the criteria of the performance triangle, requiring video bitrates exceeding 30 Mbps, tail delay below 50 ms, and fairness guarantees for multi-user concurrent access. Based on our testing and analysis, existing RTBC-oriented rate control solutions, including end-to-end algorithms and network-assisted algorithms, fail to simultaneously satisfy all performance metrics. The native dynamic delay and physical-layer resource allocation strategy inherent to the 5G radio access network (RAN) are the key reasons. These solutions lack adaptation to the 5G architecture, leading to reduced decision performance. This paper proposes Choir, an innovative collaborative solution mainly deployed on 5G base stations that deeply integrates 5G radio characteristics and video streaming traffic patterns to guide efficient sender-side rate control. Extensive simulation and testbed evaluations demonstrate Choir's significant performance in achieving high average bitrate, low tail delay, and inter-flow fairness across different 5G network scenarios.