What happens when adaptive video streaming players compete in time-varying bandwidth conditions?

Abstract

Competition among adaptive video streaming players severely diminishes user-QoE. When players compete at a bottleneck link many do not obtain adequate resources. This imbalance eventually causes ill effects such as screen flickering and video stalling. There have been many attempts in recent years to overcome some of these problems. However, added to the competition at the bottleneck link there is also the possibility of varying network bandwidth which can make the situation even worse. This work focuses on such a situation. It evaluates current heuristic adaptive video players at a bottleneck link with time-varying bandwidth conditions. Experimental setup includes the TAPAS player and emulated network conditions. The results show PANDA outperforms FESTIVE, ELASTIC and the Conventional players.

Performance of Q-Learning algorithms in DASH

“…The concept of adaptive video streaming is based on the idea to adapt the bandwidth required by the video stream to the throughput available on the network path from the stream source to the client [26]. These algorithms can live at the server [25], at an intermediate network device [24] or at the client [28]. With client-side protocols it is the player that decides what bitrate to request for any fragment, improving server-side scalability.…”

“…However, HTTP/TCP use reveals further challenges as adaptation is on top of TCPs congestion control algorithm, which forms nested control loops. As the throughput of the TCP connection depends on both the link capacity and the amount of congestion, the throughput can vary significantly over time [28].…”

Untitled

“…The concept of adaptive video streaming is based on the idea to adapt the bandwidth required by the video stream to the throughput available on the network path from the stream source to the client [26]. These algorithms can live at the server [25], at an intermediate network device [24] or at the client [28]. With client-side protocols it is the player that decides what bitrate to request for any fragment, improving server-side scalability.…”

“…However, HTTP/TCP use reveals further challenges as adaptation is on top of TCPs congestion control algorithm, which forms nested control loops. As the throughput of the TCP connection depends on both the link capacity and the amount of congestion, the throughput can vary significantly over time [28].…”