ViCrypt to the Rescue: Real-Time, Machine-Learning-Driven Video-QoE Monitoring for Encrypted Streaming Traffic

Video streaming is the killer application of the Internet today. In this article, we address the problem of real-time, passive Quality-of-Experience (QoE) monitoring of HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming (HAS), from the Internet-Service-Provider (ISP) perspective – i.e., relying exclusively on in-network traffic measurements. Given the wide adoption of end-to-end encryption, we resort to machine-learning (ML) models to estimate multiple key video-QoE indicators (KQIs) from the analysis of the encrypted traffic. We present ViCrypt, an ML-driven monitoring solution able to infer the most important KQIs for HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), namely stalling, initial delay, video resolution, and average video bitrate. ViCrypt performs estimations in real-time, during the playback of an ongoing video-streaming session, with a fine-grained temporal resolution of just one second. For this, it relies on lightweight, stream-like features continuously extracted from the encrypted stream of packets. Empirical evaluations on a large and heterogeneous corpus of YouTube measurements show that ViCrypt can infer the targeted KQIs with high accuracy, enabling large-scale passive video-QoE monitoring and proactive QoE-aware traffic management. Different from the state of the art, and besides real-time operation, ViCrypt is not bound to coarse-grained KQI-classes, providing better and sharper insights than other solutions. Finally, ViCrypt does not require chunk-detection approaches for feature extraction, significantly reducing the complexity of the monitoring approach, and potentially improving on generalization to different HAS protocols used by other video-streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.