Measuring Video QoE from Encrypted Traffic

Tracking and maintaining satisfactory QoE for video streaming services is becoming a greater challenge for mobile network operators than ever before. Downloading and watching video content on mobile devices is currently a growing trend among users, that is causing a demand for higher bandwidth and better provisioning throughout the network infrastructure. At the same time, popular demand for privacy has led many online streaming services to adopt end-to-end encryption, leaving providers with only a handful of indicators for identifying QoE issues. In order to address these challenges, we propose a novel methodology for detecting video streaming QoE issues from encrypted traffic. We develop predictive models for detecting different levels of QoE degradation that is caused by three key influence factors, i.e. stalling, the average video quality and the quality variations. The models are then evaluated on the production network of a large scale mobile operator, where we show that despite encryption our methodology is able to accurately detect QoE problems with 72\%-92\% accuracy, while even higher performance is achieved when dealing with cleartext traffic