Variants of the Constrained Bottleneck LAN Edge Link in Household Networks

Abstract

Competition among adaptive video streaming players severely reduces user-QoE. This occurs as resource allocation becomes unfair. We refer to this as the bottleneck link problem. The resource imbalance creates severe user annoyance such as screen flickering and video freezes. However, there are numerous conditions that amplifies the problems. Some of these are well documented in the literature but we intend to highlight the major conditions at a bottleneck link in household LANs. These are time-varying bandwidth, TCP long-lived flows, players pausing, starting/re-starting and stopping and increases in player numbers. We explore these conditions and evaluate the performance of heuristic adaptive video players. ELASTIC and PANDA players are evaluated. Experimental setup includes the TAPAS player and emulated network conditions. The results show that players are well suited to specific conditions.

What happens when stochastic adaptive video streaming players share a bottleneck link?

“…It is very challenging to provide satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) during an entire video session [15], [18], [16]. When there are one or multiple players working in a bandwidth rich environment, adaptive streaming works very well.…”