DECOMOD: collaborative DASH with download enhancing based on multiple mobile devices cooperation

Receiving video streams on mobile devices has become a norm rather than an exception on today's Internet --- the year 2013 witnessed a global mobile traffic growth of 70%, in which video traffic accounts for over 50%. There is however a big gap between the download bandwidth of mobile devices and the rapidly increasing bitrate of online videos. To address this problem from a system perspective, we design a social-aware cooperative streaming framework called DECOMOD, in which local friends serve as peers such that an aggregated bandwidth can be achieved to ensure a high streaming quality. Our contributions in designing and implementing this system are summarized as follows: (1) We propose a social-aware cooperative DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) streaming framework that aggregates bandwidths from local friends, over a hybrid mobile network (i.e., WIFI and Bluetooth); (2) We design a local bitrate selection strategy that jointly considers the download speed and battery level; (3) We implement the system and experimentally evaluate its performance --- high streaming quality and low freezing buffer time are provided in double to viewers.