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SABA: segment and buffer aware rate adaptation algorithm for streaming over HTTP

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Abstract

Adaptive streaming allows for dynamic adaptation of the bitrate to varying network conditions, to guarantee the best user experience. Adaptive bitrate algorithms face a significant challenge in correctly estimating the throughput, as the throughput varies widely over time. The current throughput estimation methods cannot distinguish between throughput fluctuations of different amplitude and frequency. In this paper, we propose a throughput estimation method that accurately estimates the throughput based on previous throughput samples. It is robust to short term and small fluctuations, and sensitive to large fluctuations in throughput. Furthermore, we propose a rate adaptive algorithm for video on demand (VoD) services that selects the quality of the video based on the estimated throughput and playback buffer occupancy. The objective of the rate adaptive algorithms is to guarantee high video quality to improve user experience. The proposed algorithm dynamically adjusts the quality level of the video stream. The proposed method selects high quality video segments, while minimizing the risk of playback interruption. Furthermore, the proposed method minimizes the frequency of video rate changes. We show that the algorithm smoothly switches the video rate to improve user experience. Furthermore, we determine that it efficiently utilizes network resources to achieve a high video rate; competing HTTP clients achieve equitable video rates. We also confirm that variations in the playback buffer size and segment duration do not affect the performance of the proposed algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2017-0-00224, Development of generation, distribution and consumption technologies of dynamic media based on UHD broadcasting contents). It has also been conducted by the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Kwangwoon University, 447-1 Wolgye-Dong, Nowon-Gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Waqas ur Rahman & Kwangsue Chung

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  1. Waqas ur Rahman
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  2. Kwangsue Chung
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Correspondence to Kwangsue Chung.

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Communicated by M. Claypool.

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Rahman, W.u., Chung, K. SABA: segment and buffer aware rate adaptation algorithm for streaming over HTTP. Multimedia Systems 24, 509–529 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-018-0588-7

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