AutoRec: Accelerating Loss Recovery for Live Streaming in a Multi-Supplier Market

Due to the limited permissions for upgrading dualside (i.e., server-side and client-side) loss tolerance schemes from the perspective of CDN vendors in a multi-supplier market, modern large-scale live streaming services are still using the automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) based paradigm for loss recovery, which only requires server-side modifications. In this paper, we first conduct a large-scale measurement study with up to 50 million live streams. We find that loss shows dynamics and live streaming contains frequent on-off mode switching in the wild. We further find that the recovery latency, enlarged by the ubiquitous retransmission loss, is a critical factor affecting live streaming's client-side QoE (e.g., video freezing). We then propose an enhanced recovery mechanism called AutoRec, which can transform the disadvantages of on-off mode switching into an advantage for reducing loss recovery latency without any modifications on the client side. AutoRec allows users to customize overhead tolerance and recovery latency tolerance and adaptively adjusts strategies as the network environment changes to ensure that recovery latency meets user demands whenever possible while keeping overhead under control. We implement AutoRec upon QUIC and evaluate it via testbed and real-world commercial services deployments. The experimental results demonstrate the practicability and profitability of AutoRec.