iRED: Improving the DASH QoS by dropping packets in programmable data planes

Video services account for the largest share of all Internet traffic, demanding a network capable of supporting the requirements of delay-sensitive traffic. Fluctuations in network load can cause high delays in the queues of network routers, which tend to degrade the Quality of Service (QoS) for adaptive video streaming, such as Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). This work is positioned in the scope of active management queues (AQM) to improve the QoS of a DASH service by means of dropping packets. One traditional AQM that adopts a packet drop policy is Random Early Detection (RED), developed to drain the flow in times of congestion and thus reduce queueing delay. We revisited and implemented a P4-based implementation of RED, named iRED (ingress RED), an algorithm capable of dropping packets at the ingress pipeline, an innovation compared to other AQM strategies based on dropping at the egress. iRED was evaluated in two scenarios. First, we compare iRED against state-of-art AQM algorithms employing egress packet dropping in terms of Round-Trip Time (RTT), throughput and their impact on resources usage. Our findings indicate that iRED outperforms existing P4-based approaches by approximately up to 2.5x in RTT and 0.75x in throughput for the given buffer sizes. Next, we compare iRED versus Tail Drop (TD) approach in an emulated programmable Content Delivery Network (CDN) employing DASH. Experiments indicate that the iRED improve the QoS by approximately 0.85x in terms of cached video available in the client’s buffer and 0.9x in Frames Per Second (FPS) played.