Improving User Experience When HTTP Adaptive Streaming Clients Compete for Bandwidth

摘要

The past decade has witnessed a tremendous increase in high-definition video consumption over the internet and the emergence of the HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) technique, designed to cope with highly varying delivery conditions. Despite all its inherent advantages, HAS suffers from weaknesses when competing for bandwidth. In this paper, we focus on improving the HAS behavior for several cases of bandwidth competition. We propose in the first part a dynamic traffic shaping method operating in two phases (transient and steady) to improve the convergence speed when HAS competes with a greedy TCP flow. However, when competition takes place among several HAS clients, this solution suboptimally uses the bandwidth. Therefore, the second part investigates HAS client collaboration, defining information to be exchanged between clients and a common set of rules to request the best representation.