Improving Fairness, Efficiency, and Stability in HTTP-Based Adaptive Video Streaming With Festive

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 326 - 340
• Main Authors: Junchen Jiang, Sekar, Vyas, Hui Zhang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation; Bandwidth; Bit rate; Bit-rate adaptation; Buildings; Construction; DASH; Design engineering; Efficiency; HTTP; Internet video; Networks; Overlaying; Players; Protocols; quality of experience (QoE); Robustness; Scheduling; Servers; Stability; Streaming media
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2013.2291681

Modern video players today rely on bit-rate adaptation in order to respond to changing network conditions. Past measurement studies have identified issues with today's commercial players when multiple bit-rate-adaptive players share a bottleneck link with respect to three metrics: fairness, efficiency, and stability. Unfortunately, our current understanding of why these effects occur and how they can be mitigated is quite limited. In this paper, we present a principled understanding of bit-rate adaptation and analyze several commercial players through the lens of an abstract player model consisting of three main components: bandwidth estimation, bit-rate selection, and chunk scheduling. Using framework, we identify the root causes of several undesirable interactions that arise as a consequence of overlaying the video bit-rate adaptation over HTTP. Building on these insights, we develop a suite of techniques that can systematically guide the tradeoffs between stability, fairness, and efficiency and thus lead to a general framework for robust video adaptation. We pick one concrete instance from this design space and show that it significantly outperforms today's commercial players on all three key metrics across a range of experimental scenarios.