Rosevin: Employing Resource- and Rate-Adaptive Edge Super-Resolution for Video Streaming

Today’s video streaming service providers have exploited cloud-edge collaborative networks for geo-distributed video delivery. The existing content delivery network (CDN) scheduling and adaptive bitrate algorithms may not fully utilize edge resources or lack a global control to optimize resource sharing. The emerging super-resolution (SR) approach can unleash the potential of leveraging computation resources to compensate for bandwidth consumption, by producing high-quality videos from low-resolution contents. Yet the uncertain SR resource sensitivity and its interplay with bitrate adaptation are underexplored. In this work, we propose Rosevin, the first resource scheduler that jointly decides the bitrates and fine-grained resource allocation to perform SR at the edge, which can learn to optimize the long-term QoE for distributed end users. To handle the time-varying and complex space of decisions as well as a non-smooth objective function, Rosevin realizes a novel online combinatorial learning algorithm, which nicely integrates convex optimization theories and online learning techniques. In addition to theoretically analyzing its performance, we implement an SR-assisted video streaming prototype of Rosevin and demonstrate its advantages over several video delivery benchmarks.