Shaping HTTP adaptive streams using receive window tuning method in home gateway

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new method, called RWTM (Receive Window Tuning Method) that shapes HTTP adaptive streams. It employs the flow control in the gateway to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of users. Our use case is when two HTTP Adaptive streaming clients are competing for bandwidth in the same home network. Results show that our proposed method considerably improves the QoE; it improves the video stability, the fidelity to optimal video quality level selection and the convergence speed to the optimal video quality level.

Accurate Available Bandwidth Allocation in HTTP Adaptive Streaming

“…As mentioned, shaping traffic has been known as a effective method to maintain the requested bitrate level for the users [1][2][3][4]. However, determining an appropriate available bandwidth to allocate to the users is a challenge.…”

“…When the available bandwidth shrinks due to the bandwidth competition [16], the unfairness and instability problems of the requested bitrate will occur. The traffic shaping method effectively solves these problems [1][2][3][4]. Particularly, in [4], the authors proposed a method to identify how much available bandwidth is needed for the traffic shaping based on Eq.…”

“…Shaping traffic [1][2][3][4] is known as the most common control action by which available bandwidth is allocated to the user. This allows the users to experience video with expected encoding bitrate after several requests.…”

Evaluation of gateway-based shaping methods for HTTP Adaptive Streaming

“…Our proposed method, Receive Window Tuning Method (RWTM) [13], was also integrated in the gateway due to the convenience of gateway-based solutions, described above. It is based on TCP flow control to define the shaping rate for each HAS client in accordance with the bandwidth manager's directions.…”

“…In Section II, we describe and critique recent works addressing related methods. In Section III, we define a well-optimized bandwidth manager and describe the gateway-based shaping method Receive Window Tuning Method (RWTM) [13]. Section IV presents the experimental implementation that was used.…”