A priority-based adaptive scheme for multi-view live streaming over HTTP

Abstract

Adaptive streaming over Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) has been widely used for the transmission of video content. Most of the existing studies about HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) concentrate on improving resource efficiency, fairness among users, and quality of service for single-source videos. However, there is a growing number of live streaming applications, such as video-casts of courses, where service providers want to transmit video streams of different scenes simultaneously over the bandwidth-constrained network. Since concurrent streams further deteriorate the insufficient bandwidth situation, a systematic solution is highly needed to utilize the resources efficiently and guarantee the quality of multi-view video services. In this paper, we propose a priority-based adaptive scheme for multi-view live streaming based on HTTP streaming. Firstly, we adopt an integrated bandwidth prediction approach to calculate the available bandwidth, solving the low bandwidth utilization problem existing in the benchmark method. Secondly, we design a unified segment request strategy to restrict the interval between each request, and guarantee the synchronization of different live video streams. Finally, an adaptive scheduling algorithm is proposed with respect to priorities, to dynamically adjust the quality level of multiple video streams and improve the quality of multi-view video service. Simulations show that the proposed scheme makes considerable improvements compared to the benchmarks.