British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

Brahim Allan

Rory Stewart Turnbull

Ian Barry Crabtree

Timothy Sean Stevens

Michael Erling Nilsson

Stephen Clifford Appleby

Michael Eilling Nilsson

Examples of the present invention present a method of controlling content delivery in a network. A global quality of experience measure, QoE, is calculated based on the packet loss rate in the network. As packet loss rate varies as a result of congestion conditions in the network, so will QoE. A server delivering content over the network will attempt to reach QoEfor the content in its respective session. Those sessions with a quality of experience, QoE, less than QoEwill have its packet dispatch rate increased, and those with a QoE higher than QoEwill reduce its packet dispatch rate, subject to any delivery deadlines associated with the session. If the delivery deadlines of the sessions can be met without exceeding QoE, then all sessions will end up achieving QoE. Since QoEis only a function of packet loss rate that all sessions miming over the same shared network agree upon, all sessions should converge on the same QoE.

Deadline driven content delivery

The invention presents a method of providing a modified manifest to a video client for streaming a video sequence associated with the manifest. An original manifest is modified to replace references to locations of lower quality, or bit rate, segments with references to equivalent segments at a higher quality, or bit rate, if the higher quality segment is cached locally. Then, when the video client determines that a given quality of segment should be streamed, it uses the modified manifest to retrieve the appropriate reference for that segment, and if a replacement has taken place, will be provided with the reference to the replacement segment at the higher quality. Thus, the client will always be provided with the highest possible quality segment taking into account local caching.

Video caching

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London, United Kingdom

Brahim Allan