A control – theoretic approach for adaptive streaming over HTTP

Abstract

Video applications account for a large percentage of Internet traffic, and their utilization tends to grow. In this scenario, multimedia providers are required to deliver video and/or audio content in a seamless manner, regardless of network conditions and client device capabilities. However, current commercial services are not efficient enough, and the academic proposals do not take full advantage of their potential. To this end, we propose a control-theoretic adaptive streaming over HTTP system, which adapts the video quality to the network conditions in a video session. With this system, we aim at delivering video with the highest Quality of Experience possible, while leveraging the available network resources. Our system is located at the client side, and comprises a control system and a state machine. Together, they select the video level that is requested to the server, a standard HTTP server, which sends video chunks as the client requests them. To select the control system and state machine that best fit our requirements, we perform several experiments with different parameter values combinations. Our parameter selection is accomplished in two steps, the last one resulting in the combination that best fits our needs. Then, we compare our system performance to an existent system in the academia. Our experimental results show the benefits of providing more aggressive decisions on the video quality selection. However, they also show that such aggressiveness may, sometimes, compromise the system performance. Overall, though, our system outperforms the baseline of our experiments.