PaCs: Playing Time-Aware Chunk Selection in Short Video Preloading

Short video applications are popular nowadays. Typically, a short video may be played for a few seconds or swiped away by users at any time. Due to this uncertain user behavior, video chunks should be preloaded to ensure a smooth viewing process for users. In other words, the short video preloading scheme is crucial to the quality of experience (QoE) of users and revenue. Specifically, the short video preloading scheme should determine which video chunk to download, when to download it, and at what bitrate. Existing schemes either fail to consider all these factors together or find it hard to make the best decision. In this work, we argue that the selection of downloaded video chunks is the foremost task due to the uncertain user behaviors and the corresponding huge number of possible playing sequences of video chunks. As a step further, we propose the playing time-aware chunk selection (PaCs) scheme, which downloads the video chunk with the smallest expected playing time first. After the selection of the video chunk, the bitrate is selected according to the classic MPC algorithm and then whether the downloading process is paused or executed is discussed. In total, PaCs can improve the score consisting of the QoE of downloaded video chunks and the utilized network bandwidth under different conditions. Simulations confirm that PaCs achieves a higher score than the existing scheme Dashlet proposed in NSDI 2024.