A Novel Bandwidth Estimation Method Based on MACD for DASH

Nowadays, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) has become very popular in streaming multimedia contents. In DASH, a client estimates current network bandwidth and then determines an appropriate video quality with bitrate matching the estimated bandwidth. Thus, estimating accurately the available bandwidth is a significant premise in the quality of video streaming, especially when network traffic fluctuates substantially. To cope with this challenge, researchers have presented various filters to estimate network bandwidth adaptively. However, experiment results show that current schemes either adapt slowly to network changes or adapt fast but are very sensitive to delay jitter and produce sharply changed estimation. This paper presents a novel bandwidth estimation scheme based on Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD). We applied an MACD indicator and its two thresholds to classifying network states into stable state and agile state, based on the network state different filters are applied to estimate network bandwidth. In the paper, we studied the performance of various MACD indicators and the threshold values on bandwidth estimation. Then we used a DASH proxy-based environment to compare the performance of the presented scheme with current well-known schemes. The simulation results illustrate that the MACD-based bandwidth estimation scheme performs superior to existing schemes both in the speed of adaptively to network changes and in stability in bandwidth estimation.