Movie: A measurement tool for mobile video streaming on smartphones

Abstract

Mobile video streaming is becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a cross-platform measurement tool called MoVIE (Mobile Video Information Extraction) for video streaming on mobile devices. MoVIE is a client-side traffic analyzer that studies smartphone video streaming from different viewpoints. It collects information about network-level packet traffic, transport-layer flows, and application-level video player activities. Then it identifies relationships within the collected data to make mobile video streaming activities transparent. MoVIE is an open-source tool with a graphical user interface. In addition to network traffic measurement, MoVIE supports objective Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation of video streaming. These features make MoVIE a powerful tool for network traffic measurement, multimedia streaming studies, and privacy analysis. We illustrate MoVIE' scapabilities with a small case study of streaming 360° videos.