Adaptive bitrate streaming protocols, such as DASH, have seen extensive interests for their adaptation capabilities to increase consumers' Quality of Experience (QoE) over the Internet, and have become de-facto standards in web video delivery. Compared with traditional single-server approaches, multipleserver streaming offers the opportunity to exploit expanded bandwidth, link diversity, and reliability. In this paper, we expose our solution for multiple-server support to dynamic adaptive streaming applications: Multiple-Source Streaming (MS-Stream). Thanks to its codec agnosticism and DASH-compliance our contribution is a pragmatic and evolving solution for QoE enhancement that can be applied to many streaming architectures (CDNs, Clouds) and is particularly suited for distributed environments such as P2P or Set-Top-Box overlays. In addition, splitting content into multiple independent sub-streams provides the opportunity to achieve easy-to-design bitrate adaptation and server-switching mechanisms. We empirically validate our approach using an extensive collection of network profiles provided by the DASH Industry Forum. Our solution is compared with the full potential of DASH with several servers over several QoE criteria. Results show the QoE gain of using MS-Stream against DASH; an online demonstration is made available.

The efficient provision of multiple services via emerging mobile networking architectures will play a crucial role, towards the realization of the smart city concept. Several of the most demanding (from the required bandwidth point of view) scenarios in smart cities are related with media streaming, which is a key component in smart applications, like Smart Entertainment, Smart Tourism and Smart Surveillance, etc. Such applications are associated with the request of exploiting considerable amount of data, which is difficult to achieve especially in dense urban environments. In this context, this article presents a new solution for HTTP-compliant adaptive media streaming, dedicated to future 5G mobile networking systems. It aims at increasing bandwidth availability for media streaming, through the use of multiple radio access technologies and direct connections established between devices, if they are in proximity of each-other. The proposed solution considers the scenario, in which a high quality media stream is received by multi-path transmission in the Radio Access Network. The transmission exploits collaboration of neighboring devices, which can use direct device-to-device links. Thus, proxy nodes can be inserted between a given media receiver and access network. Towards ensuring optimized resource allocation at both levels: base-station-to-device and device-to-device, this paper introduces the modules required for collaboration streaming inside Radio Access Networks. The efficiency of the presented system is enhanced through the use of adaptive streaming technology with multiple description coding, well suited to multi-path delivery.

Over the past few years, adaptive bitrate streaming protocols, such as DASH, have risen to enhance the End-Users' experience towards video consumption over the Internet. Current methods perform a smoother playback (i.e., fewer re-buffering states) trading off with quality fluctuations due to the client-server link state. The proposed work goes a step further and introduces an innovative lightweight streaming solution by taking advantage of bandwidth aggregation over multiple paths using multiple content sources at the same time. This pragmatic evolving approach outperforms the QoE delivered by current DASH-based or P2P-based solutions and leverages the scope of action made available to the media delivery chain actors. The proposed solution has been implemented and is compared to a DASH-based approach used in most existing VoD use-cases through a first set of experiments. Results demonstrate the strong advantages in terms of quality delivered at the End-User's side and buffer occupancy. Discussion on the necessary trade-offs is also tackled.