Towards Smooth and High-Quality Bitrate Adaptation for HTTP Adaptive Streaming
Abstract: Although HTTP
adaptive streaming has been well documented for the cost-effective delivery of video
streaming, it is still a great challenge to play back video smoothly with high
quality under thefluctuating network conditions. In this paper, we proposed a
novel bitrate adaptation algorithm for HTTP adaptive streaming. Our algorithm
employed two approaches for throughput estimation and bitrate selection, which
was evaluated on our testbed (a fully functional HTTP Live Streaming system)
over a network, emulated using DummyNet. First, the throughput estimation
method, based on the prediction of the difference between the estimated and
instantaneous throughputs, was observed to respond smoothly to short-term
fluctuations and rapidly to large fluctuations. Second, the bitrate selection
algorithm, based on piecewise functions to define the variation range of the
current bitrate, was found to result in smoother changes in quality with a
higher average quality. The results of our experiments demonstrated the prospects
of our bitrate adaptation algorithm for HTTP adaptive streaming.
Author: Lihong Geng
Journal Code: jptkomputergg160291
