Video transcoding for adaptive bitrate streaming over edge-cloud continuum

Abstract

Video transcoding is to create multiple representations of a video for content adaptation. It is deemed as a core technique in Adaptive BitRate (ABR) streaming. How to manage video transcoding affects the performance of ABR streaming in various aspects, including operational cost, streaming delays, Quality of Experience (QoE), etc. Therefore, the problems of implementing video transcoding in ABR streaming must be systematically studied to improve the overall performance of the streaming services. These problems become more worthy of investigation with the emergence of the edge-cloud continuum, which makes the resource allocation for video transcoding more complicated. To this end, this paper provides an investigation of the main technical problems related to video transcoding in ABR streaming, including designing a rate profile for video transcoding, providing resources for video transcoding in clouds, and caching multi-bitrate video contents in networks, etc. We analyze these problems from the perspective of resource allocation in the edge-cloud continuum and cast them into resource and Quality of Service (QoS) optimization problems. The goal is to minimize resource consumption while guaranteeing the QoS for ABR streaming. We also discuss some promising research directions for the ABR streaming services.