Measuring bandwidth and buffer occupancy to improve the QoE of HTTP adaptive streaming

AbstractLive and on-demand video streaming service systems consume significant portion of Internet traffic all over the world. HTTP adaptive streaming is becoming the de-facto standard for adaptive video streaming solutions. Conventional estimation scheme for bandwidth estimation is not appropriate to estimate the bandwidth when multiple clients compete for a common bottleneck link, due to the ON–OFF traffic pattern. They overestimate the network bandwidth which leads to degradation of quality of experience by unnecessary changes in video quality, average video quality and unfairness of video quality. In this paper, we proposed receiver-side bandwidth-measured method to achieve a better quality of experience in multiple-client scenario. The proposed method estimates the obtainable network bandwidth based on the buffer status and segment throughput. The video buffer model is associated with three thresholds (i.e., one for initial start-up and two for operating thresholds). NS-3 network simulator has been deployed to measure the performance of HTTP adaptive streaming. Simulation outputs reflect that the proposed method enhances the quality of experience than conventional methods.