Abstract:

More and more users watch videos on their mobile devices. In Q4 2016, mobile videos have eventually surpassed desktop videos in terms of the online viewing time. In this talk, I describe two of my recent projects aiming at improving the performance and reducing the network resource usage for mobile video streaming. First, we develop MP-DASH, a system that strategically leverages multiple network interfaces such as WiFi and LTE on mobile devices to stream videos. Compared to off-the-shelf multipath solutions, MP-DASH reduces the cellular data usage by up to 99% and the radio energy consumption by up to 85% with negligible degradation of the QoE. In the second project, we innovate 360-degree immersive video streaming, an important component of the virtual reality (VR) ecosystem. Our 360-degree streaming system adaptively fetches video contents based on robust prediction of a viewer's head movement, leading to significant network bandwidth reduction and video quality improvement compared to the state-of-the-art. 

Bio: 

Feng Qian is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. His research interests cover the broad areas of mobile systems, VR/AR, computer networking, and system security. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of several awards including a Key Contributor Award at AT&T Shannon Labs (2014), an NSF CRII Award (2015), a Google Faculty Award (2016), an AT&T VURI Award (2017), an NSF CAREER Award (2018), two best paper awards at ACM CoNEXT (2016 and 2018), and several best paper nominees. The ARO (mobile Application Resource Optimizer) system, his Ph.D. thesis, has been productized by AT&T and is now widely used in industry.