Eliminating bandwidth estimation from adaptive video streaming in wireless networks

Abstract

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is the state-of-the-art technology for video streaming and has been widely deployed in both wired and wireless environments. However, mobile DASH users often suffer from video quality oscillation and even video freeze in wireless environments, which results in poor user experience. This is mainly because most quality adaptation algorithms in DASH rely highly on bandwidth estimation to adjust the video quality while wireless network bandwidth is unstable in nature and changes frequently according to wireless channel contention and condition. To provide stable performance, even during severe bandwidth fluctuation, this paper proposes the Wireless Quality Adaptation (WQUAD) algorithm, which eliminates bandwidth estimation from quality adaptation. Thanks to the Scalable Video Codec (SVC), the proposed scheme always prioritizes to lower layers over higher ones as long as the play-out buffer is not completely filled by the lower layers. As a result, the client always fills the buffer with the base layers first and then the upper enhancement layers sequentially. This horizontal adaptation is straightforward and does not require any bandwidth estimation. Through NS-2 simulations, we show that WQUAD achieves (i) stable performance, keeping the video quality level with respect to the long-term network bandwidth, (ii) effective video freeze prevention, and (iii) high video quality on average.