US 9,807,592 B2 · Context-aware resource management for video streaming services

Abstract

The increasing amount of internet traffic from video streaming services, in addition to users requesting more personalized content and creating/sharing video content, has led to a huge demand for highly scalable and efficient distribution of video content, especially with mobile computing devices. Embodiments provide a network and service infrastructure better suited to these video content distribution and mobility needs. More intelligence is provided in the network infrastructure through an awareness of the user status/activity, end-user device, and content characteristics in correlation with the network bandwidth conditions. In this view of adding more intelligence in the network, additional communication is utilized between the service platform and the network to identify content characteristics (e.g., video content, content encoding characteristics), network characteristics, and device characteristics.

Claims29

Dependent claims

A user equipment (UE) comprising:

an application layer to generate a video content request;
and
a physical layer (PHY) to:
transmit the video content request and context information associated with the video content request to a network node, the context information comprising hardware characteristics of the UE;
and
receive video content in response to the transmitted video content request, the received video content to comprise a bit stream encoded based, at least in part, on the context information associated with the video content request,
wherein the video content request indicates video content of a particular quality;
and
in response to an indication in the context information of a power supply below a predetermined power and a screen size below a predetermined size, the video content received is reduced bandwidth video content that has the particular quality but a lesser compression bitrate and bandwidth, and, if the reduced bandwidth video content is not available, the video content occupies a bandwidth matching a bandwidth of the video content in the video content request and higher than the bandwidth of the reduced bandwidth video content.

6 more elements

An apparatus comprising:

an input/output (I/O) interface to:
receive a video content request and context information associated with the video content request from a mobile computing device, the context information comprising hardware characteristics of the mobile computing device;
and
transmit Quality of Service (QoS) parameters associated with the video content request;
and
QoS logic to generate the QoS parameters based, at least in part, on the context information associated with the video content request, the QoS parameters to define at least one of a packet delay tolerance, a packet loss rate, and/or a bit rate associated with transmission of the video content request,
wherein the video content request indicates video content of a particular quality, and
in response to an indication in the context information of a power supply below a predetermined power and a screen size below a predetermined size, the apparatus is further to determine whether a reduced bandwidth video content that has the particular quality but a lesser compression bitrate and bandwidth is available, and
in response to a determination that the reduced bandwidth video content is available, select the reduced bandwidth video content for transmission to the mobile computing device and reduce network resources allocated to the mobile computing device to match network resources used for the transmission of the reduced bandwidth video content, and
in response to a determination that the reduced bandwidth video content is unavailable, allocate video content comprising a bandwidth matching a bandwidth of the video content in the video content request and higher than the bandwidth of the reduced bandwidth video content.

7 more elements

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium whose contents, when executed by a computing system, cause the computing system to perform operations, comprising:

receiving a video content request and context information associated with the video content request from a mobile computing device, the context information comprising hardware characteristics of the mobile computing device, wherein the video content request indicates video content of a particular quality;
generating Quality of Service (QoS) parameters associated with the video content request based, at least in part, on the context information associated with the video content request, the QoS parameters to define at least one of a packet delay tolerance, a packet loss rate, and/or a bit rate associated with transmission of the video content request;
and
in response to an indication in the context information of a power supply below a predetermined power and a screen size below a predetermined size, determining whether a reduced bandwidth video content that has the particular quality but a lesser compression bitrate and bandwidth is available, and;
in response to a determination that the reduced bandwidth video content is available, selecting the reduced bandwidth video content for transmission to the mobile computing device and reduce network resources allocated to the mobile computing device to match network resources used for the transmission of the reduced bandwidth video content, and
in response to a determination that the reduced bandwidth video content is unavailable, allocating video content comprising a bandwidth matching a bandwidth of the video content in the video content request and higher than the bandwidth of the reduced bandwidth video content.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Context-aware resource management for video streaming services

Life of this patent

Context-aware resource management for video streaming services

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims29