DeepCast: Towards Personalized QoE for Edge-Assisted Crowdcast With Deep Reinforcement Learning

Today's anywhere and anytime broadband connection and audio/video capture have boosted the deployment of crowdsourced livecast services (or crowdcast). Bridging a massive amount of geo-distributed broadcasters and their fellow viewers, such representatives as Twitch.tv, Youtube Gaming, and Inke.tv, have greatly changed the generation and distribution landscape of streaming content. They also enable rich online interactions among the crowd, and strive to offer personalized Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for individual viewers. Given the ultra-large scale and the dynamics of the crowd, personalizing QoE however is much more challenging than in early generation streaming services. The rich interactions among the broadcasters, viewers, and the network system, on the other hand, also offer invaluable data that could be utilized towards informed management. This paper presents DeepCast, an edge-assisted crowdcast framework that explores the sheer amount of viewing data towards intelligent decisions for personalized QoE demands. DeepCast seamlessly integrates cloud, CDN, and edge servers for crowdcast content distribution, and advocates a data-driven design that extracts the hidden information from the complex interactions among the system components. Through deep reinforcement learning (DRL), it automatically identifies the most suitable strategies for viewer assignment and transcoding at edges. We collect multiple real-world datasets and evaluate the performance of DeepCast with trace-driven experiments. The results demonstrate its flexibility and effectiveness towards better personalized QoE and lower cost for crowdcast systems.