Collaborative Methods to Reduce the Disastrous Effects of the Overlapping ON Problem in DASH

Abstract

The performance of today's adaptive video streaming players (DASH) is severely hindered by overlapping ON-OFF patterns that occurs during a streaming session. High switching rates, freezing and skipping annoy users resulting in poor user-QoE. This paper attempts to overcome the ON-OFF problem by keeping players aware of each other's downloads and inter-request times. Using this a player is able to better predict future player actions and reschedule their downloads to produce least conflicts with others. If a player's start segment download overlaps with the end of one or more players' current downloads within a certain time t 1 it waits until the download of others completes before starting its own download. Conversely if too many players are sharing the bottleneck link a player will hold of its download by a time t 2 enabling others to move towards completion of their downloads. This reduces the overlap of its download with other players. Both these methods help reduce competition at the bottleneck and produces a more balanced sharing of network resources.